Hey, babies. Happy Michaelmas.
So I had my last day of work at DataSynapse on the 7th. Didn't do much in the way of celebrating -- whimper, not bang, you know -- but earlier in the week I did get all the pennies off the top of the fridge. See, for the past four and a half years, I'd been tossing my pennies up on top of the 50-cent soda machine in the office kitchen. My stated goal was to demolish the machine under the sheer weight of my loose change, but that never quite came to pass. So instead I figured I'd collect 'em and do something nice with the money. I put on some latex gloves and got up on a stool and holy god was it filthy up there but I gathered all the pennies and took them over to Commerce Bank. They have a machine that counts and collates change -- which they give you paper money for -- and if you guess how much you're pouring in within two dollars of the actual amount, you get a prize. Turned out I had $8.69 and my prize was a red felt hat, one like Santa Claus would wear. I put it on before the dude was even done cashing me out.
My friend Bryan and I hit up the Gristedes and. using the above amount as a hard spending maximum and with me still wearing the hat, selected two six-packs of Natural "Natty" Ice. We took it back to the office and split it among some of the tech people who were around. That was nice, although the natty made me feel kind of sluggish and unhappy for the rest of the day. But that was kind of it.
The new job is going swimmingly, but I'm there all the goddamn time. Initial impressions: Everybody is really friendly, and even the people with whom I don't know if I'd wanna hang out outside of work are shockingly good at what they do -- and good at a whole lot of other things, too. They're all polymaths. It's great. I'm a bit less worried about being able to do what they want, but I've still been staying 'til at least 8:00 every night for the past two weeks -- of course, it doesn't hurt that Nick, one of the founders, brought in a copy of Rock Band for "research purposes." (The Onion AV Club is right -- it is your life, now.) But, you know, yeah, I'm having a pretty great time, although, perhaps not inexplicably, my stomach's been all over the map. I even managed to get some mild but quite unpleasant food poisony-thing last Friday that forced me to beat a hasty and shameful early retreat home with my sweater tied around my waist. This surprises none of you.
Eve and I went to Mercury Lounge last weekend to see what we thought was going to be an awesome lineup of bands -- Team Robespierre opening for these dudes named Yeasayer (whom Eve's into, though she referred to them more than once as "Yeaslayer"). Unfortunately, we got confused about the order of the bands and showed up just as The Team were getting off stage. And they sounded strangely fratted-out and sloppy and not very much fun. And then this weird boy-girl duo who called themselves High Places went on and played this very self-important, serious set that involved a lot of slide whistle and very quiet singing. Yeasayer themselves were, you know, technically skillful, except that like most bands these days, they were paying some kind of ironic (or unironic, who fucking cares any more) tribute to 70s classic rock. Plus Eve and I were still confused about the lineup for the first couple of their songs and were expecting them to be Team Robespierre and play some punky Team Robespierre-style songs. And I was still kind of light-headed and queasy from the events of the previous evening. So it was not the best show I'd ever been to.
What else?
Ted got me a ticket to see this Edward Albee play that's opening on Broadway called The Homecoming with Ian McShane in the lead role. The cast was really great, especially Al Swearengen, who was genuinely scary in this one scene where he throws a bunch of punches and then demands "a kiss and a cuddle," but the play itself kind of zigs where it should zag. It's, you know, uneven. But maybe it's just me -- I read Ben Brantley's review of it in the Times, thinking he'd pan the material, but he thought the whole thing was great.
That night after the play I headed to Brooklyn Heights at the invitation of Katharine to watch the boxing match between Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather on her dad's HBO Pay-Per-View. You know me, babies -- I don't know much about sports, and certainly nothing about boxing, so this was a new thing for me. Boxing is kind of scary, it turns out, but it's not boring, and Hatton and Mayweather are clearly both pros, each coming in with, literally, no losses on his respective record. Mayweather was widely favored to win, though K-Rod's dude and his friend Matt were rooting for Hatton -- who is Mancunian and has this very cool way of flying into the fray with his right extended, like Superman. Long story short -- they both fought very well, but Mayweather won in the 10th round after knocking Hatton into the turnbuckle. Not bad, though, considering that both those guys are used to winning their fights in, like, a single round. Plus, both were able, even after being pummeled by each other for the previous 40 minutes, to give coherent interviews and, in Mayweather's case, to do some promotional bidniz on the mic.
There was a domestic disturbance in the apartment across the way a week ago. The cops came, lots of them. Tonight on the way home, this little day-care center on 4th Ave. was in the final throes of burning down, surrounded by fire engines. The ceiling plaster in the bathroom is collapsing, again. I still love my neighborhood and my apartment.
Had brunch last Sunday with The Friends at Beast. That was nice, although Katie had to leave part way through because she was too hung over to be around civilization. I know what that's like. Sometimes you have to be by yourself. What is everyone doing for the holidays? Jerry and Katie are going to Mexico, which is something I have often considered doing, but the notice is too short, I think, for me to go just now. I just got an obligatory ten days off from work, though, a top-down order from the boss, everyone doing it, and now I'm not sure how to spend it. Final Fantasy and beating off will probably be part of the mix.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Monday, December 03, 2007
First Snow
So, something I've been doing for about six months and haven't been able to write about here is that I've been looking for a new job. And, again, for reasons of propriety, I can't really talk about why I wanted to leave the 'napse, but suffice it to say that I was feeling like I'd outgrown the place. So I started looking for something a bit less corporate and bit more hip-young-person-new-media-collective, and I think I've found it in the form of Rebel Monkey. They're a startup, they make games, and one of the dudes who runs it is an acquaintance of Randy's from Parsons -- and now I have a job there! Tom tipped me off to their existence. "It seems like it'd be an awesome place to work," he told me, so, after checking out their openings, I applied, and it worked out, etc.
But making the decision to hang up my shingle with them (and unhang it at 632 Broadway) was incredibly stressful. You know me, guys -- I was deeply preoccupied with doubts as to whether I was making the right decision, whether I'd be up to the task of what the new guys want me to do. And I'd spent four and a half years at DataSynapse. Those guys are my friends, even though not all of them live within striking distance these days. My life was totally different when I started there; I was a pretty different guy, and I was certainly less... formed, you know, as a technology professional. So I'm still a bit worried about the whole thing, but the new place seems awfully nice -- the space is beautiful, the contract wonderfully reasonable, and their interview process was extremely low on brainteasers and bullshit. God knows I've had plenty of that over the past six months that I've been looking.
I can't really go into detail, but Google: I want my six hours back.
(Actually, here's a small detail, presented for the benefit of M-Biddy, who likes things like this: A convex hull is a minimal subset of a set of points such that all of the angles in the shape formed by drawing line segments between adjacent points are convex and all the points that don't comprise this shape lie within its boundaries; describe an efficient algorithm for discovering the hull. I think I found one that my interviewer hadn't heard before, but I wasn't able to explain it satisfactorily.)
Moving over to the new place has already started -- as part of the (slightly uncomfortable) agreement I negotiated between DataSynapse and Rebel Monkey, I've been going over there in the early evening for the past two weeks and working 'til around 10:00. That's a 12-hour day! And then I worked all of last weekend, slogging through a Windows networking hell largely of my own devising. I'm a bit exhausted. Tonight while I was in meeting with them, one of their florescent overhead lights kind of exploded, filling the office with burning-electronics stink. It's a startup, it's exciting. My last day at DataSynapse is this Friday. I start, officially, at Rebel Monkey on the following Monday.
Anyway, thanks are due to Vickie Lee, even though I wasn't able to go for any of the jobs she looked up for me; and to Jimmy Tones, who gave me some pro bono career counseling, although I ended up jumping back into for-profit softare instead of running off to work for Barack Obama.
Winter is here, as evidenced by the wind tonight and the snow yesterday. It's going to be Hanukkah real soon, and then Christmas. And then we begin something entirely new.
But making the decision to hang up my shingle with them (and unhang it at 632 Broadway) was incredibly stressful. You know me, guys -- I was deeply preoccupied with doubts as to whether I was making the right decision, whether I'd be up to the task of what the new guys want me to do. And I'd spent four and a half years at DataSynapse. Those guys are my friends, even though not all of them live within striking distance these days. My life was totally different when I started there; I was a pretty different guy, and I was certainly less... formed, you know, as a technology professional. So I'm still a bit worried about the whole thing, but the new place seems awfully nice -- the space is beautiful, the contract wonderfully reasonable, and their interview process was extremely low on brainteasers and bullshit. God knows I've had plenty of that over the past six months that I've been looking.
I can't really go into detail, but Google: I want my six hours back.
(Actually, here's a small detail, presented for the benefit of M-Biddy, who likes things like this: A convex hull is a minimal subset of a set of points such that all of the angles in the shape formed by drawing line segments between adjacent points are convex and all the points that don't comprise this shape lie within its boundaries; describe an efficient algorithm for discovering the hull. I think I found one that my interviewer hadn't heard before, but I wasn't able to explain it satisfactorily.)
Moving over to the new place has already started -- as part of the (slightly uncomfortable) agreement I negotiated between DataSynapse and Rebel Monkey, I've been going over there in the early evening for the past two weeks and working 'til around 10:00. That's a 12-hour day! And then I worked all of last weekend, slogging through a Windows networking hell largely of my own devising. I'm a bit exhausted. Tonight while I was in meeting with them, one of their florescent overhead lights kind of exploded, filling the office with burning-electronics stink. It's a startup, it's exciting. My last day at DataSynapse is this Friday. I start, officially, at Rebel Monkey on the following Monday.
Anyway, thanks are due to Vickie Lee, even though I wasn't able to go for any of the jobs she looked up for me; and to Jimmy Tones, who gave me some pro bono career counseling, although I ended up jumping back into for-profit softare instead of running off to work for Barack Obama.
Winter is here, as evidenced by the wind tonight and the snow yesterday. It's going to be Hanukkah real soon, and then Christmas. And then we begin something entirely new.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Live From Nilbog
Emma had a birthday. We drank; then, later, Katharine and she and I watched Troll 2 together. I hadn't known what a gold mine that fucker is in terms of bizarre dialogue and delivery. You don't piss on hospitality -- true, that.
There were a lot of fruit flies in the kitchen recently, and I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't blame it on Sophie any more, and, while I'm not great about doing the dishes, having an empty sink didn't seem to mitigate the problem. What happened, though, was that Nina was cooking steaks on my stove and went looking in the cupboard below the counter, in which Randy's got space allotted for his dry goods, for a saucepan. Next to his stash of Cheddar Bunnies was a bag of potatoes I'd left down there a month or two ago, and there were flies buzzing around that thing like nuts. It was sitting in a swamp of its own putrefaction -- something had gone terribly wrong, and, when I gaggingly hoisted the sack into the garbage, I noticed that it left a viscous trail that was bubbling and seething with a pupal host. Indeed, said ichor had spewed forth out of the cabinet onto the floor below a day before. I had assumed it was cat food gravy. It smelled like old cat food gravy! Nina dubbed the whole scene "the horror," and we determined that the remaining pool should be left for Someone Else to deal with.
Then there was The Game -- you know, when the big football teams play each other. I came up on the train after work on Friday and met up with The Friends at Rudy's. Maggie and Cliff were there -- it was great to see them! I ate some Alfie Bread (they've introduced a new Alfie Bread that has pepperoni!) and then we all crashed at Ted's house. For some reason I petitioned to share a bed with Ted, forgetting that he's a snorer. Greg and Ted made everyone breakfast in the morning, which was delicious, although my stomach was doing a thing. Around 10:30 we headed to the tailgate, which was as about the same as usual. We drank whiskey out of a thermos. The game itself was boring and Yale lost, rottenly; like Yankees fans, we left after about thirty minutes and then waited for another thirty to board a bus back to campus.
I got to pee in that trough urinal, though. Whenever I'm peeing into an unfamiliar thing, I have a second or two where I think, "Maybe I shouldn't be peeing into this!" And then I look around to make sure other people are peeing into it, and they are and I'm sorry I checked.
Master Krauss was having a party when we got to Silliman College, and Ron took us on a tour of the new, renovated dining hall and basement. I can't really think of a way to describe it to people who don't know what I'm talking about without making it sound boring, so I won't try, but suffice it to say that it was very different and kind of a strangely emotional experience. Not with tears or anything, mind you, but it's always surprising what an effect place has on you. I opted to drive back to Pelham with KT that evening instead of staying another day, because I was feeling run down. I'll get to the why a bit later. Pictures are in the photostream.
For Thanksgiving I made chorizo and spinach soup, as per this recipe. I realized part way through making it, though, that my big pot was not going to be big enough to hold it all. So, with the soup simmering on the range, I ran down to the hardware store on my corner and bought a really big pot, like, that a restaurant might use. So I finished making the soup in that (it barely filled it half-way) and then lugged the fucker on the subway over to Eve's, who was also cooking in preparation for the festivities at my parents' house. I was so exhausted when I got there that I had to eat a piece of bread and drink some whiskey. Eve made a vegan chocolate cake and some apple stuff. It was delicious! So was my soup.
There were a lot of fruit flies in the kitchen recently, and I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't blame it on Sophie any more, and, while I'm not great about doing the dishes, having an empty sink didn't seem to mitigate the problem. What happened, though, was that Nina was cooking steaks on my stove and went looking in the cupboard below the counter, in which Randy's got space allotted for his dry goods, for a saucepan. Next to his stash of Cheddar Bunnies was a bag of potatoes I'd left down there a month or two ago, and there were flies buzzing around that thing like nuts. It was sitting in a swamp of its own putrefaction -- something had gone terribly wrong, and, when I gaggingly hoisted the sack into the garbage, I noticed that it left a viscous trail that was bubbling and seething with a pupal host. Indeed, said ichor had spewed forth out of the cabinet onto the floor below a day before. I had assumed it was cat food gravy. It smelled like old cat food gravy! Nina dubbed the whole scene "the horror," and we determined that the remaining pool should be left for Someone Else to deal with.
Then there was The Game -- you know, when the big football teams play each other. I came up on the train after work on Friday and met up with The Friends at Rudy's. Maggie and Cliff were there -- it was great to see them! I ate some Alfie Bread (they've introduced a new Alfie Bread that has pepperoni!) and then we all crashed at Ted's house. For some reason I petitioned to share a bed with Ted, forgetting that he's a snorer. Greg and Ted made everyone breakfast in the morning, which was delicious, although my stomach was doing a thing. Around 10:30 we headed to the tailgate, which was as about the same as usual. We drank whiskey out of a thermos. The game itself was boring and Yale lost, rottenly; like Yankees fans, we left after about thirty minutes and then waited for another thirty to board a bus back to campus.
I got to pee in that trough urinal, though. Whenever I'm peeing into an unfamiliar thing, I have a second or two where I think, "Maybe I shouldn't be peeing into this!" And then I look around to make sure other people are peeing into it, and they are and I'm sorry I checked.
Master Krauss was having a party when we got to Silliman College, and Ron took us on a tour of the new, renovated dining hall and basement. I can't really think of a way to describe it to people who don't know what I'm talking about without making it sound boring, so I won't try, but suffice it to say that it was very different and kind of a strangely emotional experience. Not with tears or anything, mind you, but it's always surprising what an effect place has on you. I opted to drive back to Pelham with KT that evening instead of staying another day, because I was feeling run down. I'll get to the why a bit later. Pictures are in the photostream.
For Thanksgiving I made chorizo and spinach soup, as per this recipe. I realized part way through making it, though, that my big pot was not going to be big enough to hold it all. So, with the soup simmering on the range, I ran down to the hardware store on my corner and bought a really big pot, like, that a restaurant might use. So I finished making the soup in that (it barely filled it half-way) and then lugged the fucker on the subway over to Eve's, who was also cooking in preparation for the festivities at my parents' house. I was so exhausted when I got there that I had to eat a piece of bread and drink some whiskey. Eve made a vegan chocolate cake and some apple stuff. It was delicious! So was my soup.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Five Beautiful Parakeets
More show news, because I have to record what I do.
Eve and I went to see The Thermals at Warsaw on Thursday, and, despite the fact that their openers were awful, it was an amazing show. There wasn't much of a crowd as Hutch & Co. were getting set up, and we were worried that people just weren't gonna turn out, but by the time they started playing, there was a great, vigorous throng. Their set list hasn't changed much since the last time I saw them, but that was fine; they were still admirably tight and angry. Kathy Foster cut a striking figure -- her bouncy hair, kind of her signature, I feel like, was swept forward into a sort of 'fro-hawk -- and she and Hutch faced off on some of the harder numbers. She's got this captivating, stolid grace about her that... well, I won't get into it lest I get into "trouble." I am a faithful man, after all.
The bouncers at Warsaw are these creepy Polish skinheads (at some of the artier shows, Nina and I have played "Polack or hipster?"), and they were managing the crowd pretty actively that night, really front and center, up close to the stage. As I find is often the case, they paid special attention to me (height? Jacket?), even though there were plenty of jackasses in the audience, including a really smelly dreadlocked goth dude and his really smelly girlfriend.
For encores, the band covered a Built To Spill song that was okay and a Wipers song that was pretty cool. And nobody puked this time, so that was good, too.
I'm having a hard time putting into words why I didn't like the Gogol Bordello show I went to on Saturday night with Nina, Randy, Winnie, Evan, and David Bell. All I know for sure is that I was in a good mood when I walked into the joint, but within five minutes I kind of wanted to leave.
Maybe it's the music -- I've never really been sure whether I like them or not, ever since Eve lent me Gypsy Punks a year ago. On the one hand, they've got tons of energy and swell instrumentations with all sorts of old-world instruments playing in minor keys. (To picture the guy who plays the violin for them, imagine Armin Mueller-Stahl in Eastern Promises, but wearing bondage pants and a leather vest with no shirt.) On the other hand, though, the songs aren't really that catchy -- or at least, I can't remember what they sound like when I'm not hearing them. And the tone of the whole thing is kind of problematic: These guys have been compared to The Pogues, but whereas Shane MacGowan is acknowledged as a fond historian of Irish folk who's earned the right, through research (and time on a barstool), to sort of queer the genre; Eugene Hutz doesn't strike me as much of a good shepherd of Gypsy music. Either Gypsy music just isn't that good, or the band is making fun of Gypsy music -- or Hutz just isn't that smart. Or he doesn't speak English that well. With lyrics like this, it's sort of hard to tell:
That's pretty much what the audience was like. Lots of chubby white dudes in popped-collar Polo shirts, lots of spacey girls with frizzy hair in long flowing dresses (too dark to tell, but I bet there were some Henna tattoos). Every problematic rock concert audience trope was on display -- the skittish girls who didn't want anyone dancing around near them; the guy and his girlfriend trying to have a slow, protective cuddle in the middle of the mosh pit; the insanely sweaty guy really swingin' his elbows around with his eyes closed, enjoying some private groove in a contemptibly public way.
Maybe it was the venue, though -- Terminal 5 used to be Club Exit, which was basically a warehouse for bridge-and-tunnel techno douchebags, and nothing has changed besides the name. (Except that they're booking underground rock shows there?) It's got shitty access to the entrances and exits, the bars are irritatingly inaccessible, and the space is shaped such that it's impossible to navigate the types of crowds that form in front of the stage. I don't know how other places do it right, but these fuckers do it wrong.
Nina lost her phone in the crowd, but by the grace of God some nice lady found it and returned it. It still kind of works, too! We went out for dinner afterwards at Renaissance, which totally my new go-to diner for Hell's Kitchen. I'm there so much, you see.
Eve and I went to see The Thermals at Warsaw on Thursday, and, despite the fact that their openers were awful, it was an amazing show. There wasn't much of a crowd as Hutch & Co. were getting set up, and we were worried that people just weren't gonna turn out, but by the time they started playing, there was a great, vigorous throng. Their set list hasn't changed much since the last time I saw them, but that was fine; they were still admirably tight and angry. Kathy Foster cut a striking figure -- her bouncy hair, kind of her signature, I feel like, was swept forward into a sort of 'fro-hawk -- and she and Hutch faced off on some of the harder numbers. She's got this captivating, stolid grace about her that... well, I won't get into it lest I get into "trouble." I am a faithful man, after all.
The bouncers at Warsaw are these creepy Polish skinheads (at some of the artier shows, Nina and I have played "Polack or hipster?"), and they were managing the crowd pretty actively that night, really front and center, up close to the stage. As I find is often the case, they paid special attention to me (height? Jacket?), even though there were plenty of jackasses in the audience, including a really smelly dreadlocked goth dude and his really smelly girlfriend.
For encores, the band covered a Built To Spill song that was okay and a Wipers song that was pretty cool. And nobody puked this time, so that was good, too.
I'm having a hard time putting into words why I didn't like the Gogol Bordello show I went to on Saturday night with Nina, Randy, Winnie, Evan, and David Bell. All I know for sure is that I was in a good mood when I walked into the joint, but within five minutes I kind of wanted to leave.
Maybe it's the music -- I've never really been sure whether I like them or not, ever since Eve lent me Gypsy Punks a year ago. On the one hand, they've got tons of energy and swell instrumentations with all sorts of old-world instruments playing in minor keys. (To picture the guy who plays the violin for them, imagine Armin Mueller-Stahl in Eastern Promises, but wearing bondage pants and a leather vest with no shirt.) On the other hand, though, the songs aren't really that catchy -- or at least, I can't remember what they sound like when I'm not hearing them. And the tone of the whole thing is kind of problematic: These guys have been compared to The Pogues, but whereas Shane MacGowan is acknowledged as a fond historian of Irish folk who's earned the right, through research (and time on a barstool), to sort of queer the genre; Eugene Hutz doesn't strike me as much of a good shepherd of Gypsy music. Either Gypsy music just isn't that good, or the band is making fun of Gypsy music -- or Hutz just isn't that smart. Or he doesn't speak English that well. With lyrics like this, it's sort of hard to tell:
Have you ever been to American wedding?The guy sounds like a Ukrainian Andrew WK. And Andrew WK was kidding, wasn't he? At any rate, it's not like Hutz hasn't had a dark and terrifying life -- Wikipedia sez his family were refugees in the wake of Chernobyl -- why's he writing party songs for college students spending a year abroad?
Where is the vodka, where's marinated herring?
Where is the musicians who got good taste?
Where is the supply that gonna last three days?
Where is the band that [light on fire]?
Gonna keep it goin' 24 hour!
That's pretty much what the audience was like. Lots of chubby white dudes in popped-collar Polo shirts, lots of spacey girls with frizzy hair in long flowing dresses (too dark to tell, but I bet there were some Henna tattoos). Every problematic rock concert audience trope was on display -- the skittish girls who didn't want anyone dancing around near them; the guy and his girlfriend trying to have a slow, protective cuddle in the middle of the mosh pit; the insanely sweaty guy really swingin' his elbows around with his eyes closed, enjoying some private groove in a contemptibly public way.
Maybe it was the venue, though -- Terminal 5 used to be Club Exit, which was basically a warehouse for bridge-and-tunnel techno douchebags, and nothing has changed besides the name. (Except that they're booking underground rock shows there?) It's got shitty access to the entrances and exits, the bars are irritatingly inaccessible, and the space is shaped such that it's impossible to navigate the types of crowds that form in front of the stage. I don't know how other places do it right, but these fuckers do it wrong.
Nina lost her phone in the crowd, but by the grace of God some nice lady found it and returned it. It still kind of works, too! We went out for dinner afterwards at Renaissance, which totally my new go-to diner for Hell's Kitchen. I'm there so much, you see.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Hallowe'en
I've been watching AMC's monster movie marathon. It's pretty great. I love cable TV!
What am I gonna do for Halloween, though? I feel like this past weekend was pretty much it for the grown-up Halloween festivities, except for kind of institutional things like the parade. I'm not dressing up, I think. The time for that is passed. But I did buy this perfectly hideous pirate skull dealie to hang on our front door, and Randy bought some candy. I'm hoping we can hand some out to trick-or-treaters, but I really don't know for sure whether there'll be in our building (although there are plenty of kids). Este hogar es Catolico and that.
I did go to a rock show last weekend, though, over at Otto's Shrunken Head. I was there to see the delightful Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, who were playing there because it the place was doing some kind of rockabilly night? They're not really a rockabilly band, though. Not sure. Anyhow, all the bands' MySpace pages gave different times for the start of the show, and the venue's site listed them at the bottom of the list of bands, which typically means they go on first, but I couldn't believe they'd be opening for all these bands I'd never heard of, so I decided to arrive squarely in the middle of the show and just trust to providence. I get there just as this band called The Deadneks is going on, and they've got this big merch table set up, and I start doing these panicky mental calculations about how many bands could've gone on since I showed up. Plus I'd seen the frontman for DFHC, Dave, wandering around the crowd in full makeup, which was weird, because they usually do a whole intro where he gets into costume and then comes out from behind something, like a speaker cabinet or a door or something. You know, pageantry.
There was a guy standing in front of me, a sort of hulking, bald, impassive, baby-faced lump, wearing one of those glossy jackets that skinheads wear; I've found that this type is, oddly enough, a fixture at small punk shows. Maybe he was a skinhead. But he was talking to this girl whose boyfriend, I think, had temporarily abandoned her, and I overheard the following snippet of conversation:
Anyway, The Deadneks weren't very good, although their lead singer had a kind of cool Chelsea smile and their bass player was playing an awesome, shiny white electric upright bass with a wireless transmitter, and he'd kind of walk it out of the room and up and down the hall by the bathrooms. But they were a bit too screamy and the songs weren't very clever and the guitar and bass weren't tight enough. After them came the Memphis Morticians, who were actually pretty okay although none of their songs had any really catchy hooks.
DFHC did come on after that, thank the fuck Christ, and they were incredible. As usual, inexplicably, the crowd thinned out by about half as they were going on, but the band was impeccable -- ungodly energetic, given the hour, and just really precise and tight. It might have been the best performance of theirs that I've seen so far. Dr. Fangs pogoed into the audience as soon as they started, and everybody was dancing around vigorously -- one lanky, preternaturally tall dude in a leather jacket (not me, believe it or not), jumped on Dr. Fangs' back and rode him around (he's a pretty big guy) for several numbers. People crashed into the instruments, prompting facetious admonition from the band members, who were themselves tossing and kicking their guitars around on the beer-slopped floor. As an encore, they covered Psycho by The Sonics, which is a pretty great song for them, I think. There was even some crowd surfing, though the venue hardly had the room for it -- this shrimpy bespectacled kid in a blazer got boosted up and thrown around for a bit. After the band quit the stage, he somehow wound up with the mic and explained that although it was his birthday that night, "it's all about the music."
Lucretia Secretions was absent, no explanation given.
On my way out, I saw Dave pooped out on a stool near the bar. He looked exhausted, understably. "You guys were amazing," I said. He muttered something appreciative. These guys might be the spiritual heirs to The Dickies. And it's just as well, 'cuz I don't think those guys are going on tour or putting out any records any time soon.
What am I gonna do for Halloween, though? I feel like this past weekend was pretty much it for the grown-up Halloween festivities, except for kind of institutional things like the parade. I'm not dressing up, I think. The time for that is passed. But I did buy this perfectly hideous pirate skull dealie to hang on our front door, and Randy bought some candy. I'm hoping we can hand some out to trick-or-treaters, but I really don't know for sure whether there'll be in our building (although there are plenty of kids). Este hogar es Catolico and that.
I did go to a rock show last weekend, though, over at Otto's Shrunken Head. I was there to see the delightful Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, who were playing there because it the place was doing some kind of rockabilly night? They're not really a rockabilly band, though. Not sure. Anyhow, all the bands' MySpace pages gave different times for the start of the show, and the venue's site listed them at the bottom of the list of bands, which typically means they go on first, but I couldn't believe they'd be opening for all these bands I'd never heard of, so I decided to arrive squarely in the middle of the show and just trust to providence. I get there just as this band called The Deadneks is going on, and they've got this big merch table set up, and I start doing these panicky mental calculations about how many bands could've gone on since I showed up. Plus I'd seen the frontman for DFHC, Dave, wandering around the crowd in full makeup, which was weird, because they usually do a whole intro where he gets into costume and then comes out from behind something, like a speaker cabinet or a door or something. You know, pageantry.
There was a guy standing in front of me, a sort of hulking, bald, impassive, baby-faced lump, wearing one of those glossy jackets that skinheads wear; I've found that this type is, oddly enough, a fixture at small punk shows. Maybe he was a skinhead. But he was talking to this girl whose boyfriend, I think, had temporarily abandoned her, and I overheard the following snippet of conversation:
"Yeah, so the body was on the tracks, but they found the head up in the engine."A little while later, this man and two women were standing behind me, and I overheard them complaining about how they couldn't see because of how tall I was. I turned around and sort of mumbled an apology and stepped to one side. They were a little embarrassed, and the guy said, "Oh, hey, that's the same guy who was fixing the mousetrap!" What? I said. "You were over there earlier," he said, pointing at one of the couches, "fixing this box" -- "It was an effects pedal," said one of the women. That wasn't me, I said. "Really?" he said. "Maybe you're wearing a disguise now." Yeah, I said. That's my costume. I'm a tall guy who goes to a show.
"The engine! Do you get a lot of suicides on the LIRR?"
"Well, Metro North, but, yeah."
Anyway, The Deadneks weren't very good, although their lead singer had a kind of cool Chelsea smile and their bass player was playing an awesome, shiny white electric upright bass with a wireless transmitter, and he'd kind of walk it out of the room and up and down the hall by the bathrooms. But they were a bit too screamy and the songs weren't very clever and the guitar and bass weren't tight enough. After them came the Memphis Morticians, who were actually pretty okay although none of their songs had any really catchy hooks.
DFHC did come on after that, thank the fuck Christ, and they were incredible. As usual, inexplicably, the crowd thinned out by about half as they were going on, but the band was impeccable -- ungodly energetic, given the hour, and just really precise and tight. It might have been the best performance of theirs that I've seen so far. Dr. Fangs pogoed into the audience as soon as they started, and everybody was dancing around vigorously -- one lanky, preternaturally tall dude in a leather jacket (not me, believe it or not), jumped on Dr. Fangs' back and rode him around (he's a pretty big guy) for several numbers. People crashed into the instruments, prompting facetious admonition from the band members, who were themselves tossing and kicking their guitars around on the beer-slopped floor. As an encore, they covered Psycho by The Sonics, which is a pretty great song for them, I think. There was even some crowd surfing, though the venue hardly had the room for it -- this shrimpy bespectacled kid in a blazer got boosted up and thrown around for a bit. After the band quit the stage, he somehow wound up with the mic and explained that although it was his birthday that night, "it's all about the music."
Lucretia Secretions was absent, no explanation given.
On my way out, I saw Dave pooped out on a stool near the bar. He looked exhausted, understably. "You guys were amazing," I said. He muttered something appreciative. These guys might be the spiritual heirs to The Dickies. And it's just as well, 'cuz I don't think those guys are going on tour or putting out any records any time soon.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Apple Bapple
It's finally rainy and cold, which I would be hell of enjoying if not for the fact that I'm still recovering from the worst case of the grippe I've had in quite some time. But more on that in a second.
My friend Squick came down to NYC from Boston on his vacation last Friday and stopped off at work to say hi. We hung out with PT at Bite and had some "drink," which was definitely welcome, given how awful and stressful work has been lately. I'd gotten my hair cut that day by my guy at Astor Hair, Edward, who looks and sounds like a Joe Sacco drawing and gives great haircuts but is utterly unemotive when it comes to pretty much everything. (While I was waiting on Friday, he was cutting the thick, spiky hair of this Asian kid, and he marveled, in a monotone, of course, "Your hair. So much. It like whole other head."
So we were talking about Edward and hair and the cutting of it, and this guy Elo who's a bouncer at Temple Bar came over and started extolling the benefits of shaving with a straight razor. He's kind of a big-shot in the Dominican Republic, he says -- he owns his own pool hall that he won off a guy -- and he's super into collecting razors and shaving paraphernalia. The pride of his collection is one of the razors belonging to the personal barber of Rafael Trujillo. "That guy was like our Hitler," Elo said. (Presumably he didn't mean the barber.) The razor's got this incredible mother-of-pearl handle, and, presumably, some genetic material belonging to the former dictator. "I'm going to restore it," he said. "Wouldn't a museum be interested in those flakes of skin?" I asked. "Nah," he said. "'s worth more if I clean it off." He told me I should Google him to find the forum he posts to in order to get his personal picks for shaving soap and astringents. "I'm like the seventh hit," he said. "He's right," said Squick. "Right after Electric Light Orchestra."
Apple picking got done on Saturday. We usually (well, for the past two years) go to a place called Wright's Farm in Ulster County, NY. That place is great, but it takes a really long time to get to, and we were kind of ready for a change. So this year we went to Riamede Farms, which is in New Jersey, and is just as nice, apple-wise, although they don't have a cool little cafe the way Wright's did, nor do they have dilly beans. Ted (driving) and Tom and 'Leen and Greg (down from MIT) came this time -- Katharine was in the middle of a hellish close at the 'xim, Emma's under the gun on her book, and Nina had midterms to cram for. And Katie just kind of inexplicably bowed out at the last moment. Still, we managed to have a great time -- the evidence is in my photostream. The apples were all huge and strangely luminous, and we ate and picked a ton. I got not one but two grasshoppers put down my shirt (though I may have squealed and cringed about twice as much as last year), and Ted gave himself a pretty deep cut by trying to yank a tough, fibrous weed out of the ground in the pumpkin patch. I don't know what I'm going to do with all my apples. A pie, prolly?
We convened at 680 afterwards to mull some cider and enjoy the material fruits of our fruit-labor -- and the previously absent ladies did show up for this -- but everybody was so exhausted that it wasn't really much of a shindig. Colleen called from her place a few minutes in and asked Tom if he could help her dispose of a rat she and her roommates had nabbed in a glue trap. Tom, not particularly relishing the idea of the actual, uh, disposal, asked if I wanted to help, and I'm all, you know, sure. So we head over there and the thing is kind of writing around in the trap grotesquely, stuck by it's legs, but also sort of keeled over and gummed up on its side. It can't really move much at all -- not a case for extraction, certainly. And it's definitely a rat (I'm a little skeptical of Nina's theory that there are no mice in New York, only baby Norwegian Browns); the shape of its head and back are pretty telltale. So Tom puts the thing in a plastic bag, and we head down to the street, wearing work gloves and filled with terrible purpose. I grab one of those big cobblestone things they use to line the planters the city plants trees in, and I just kind of bash the bag a whole bunch. That's not really a problem for me -- I'm a firm believer in putting things out of their misery -- but in mid-bash, a bunch of dirt flies off the cobblestone and gets in my mouth! And I'm all ack, pbthhh.
As the evening starts to wind down, I start feeling kind of unwell -- throat's all scratchy, nose is running -- and of course I think, oh god, I got plague from the rat bits! But not really. I got plague from Nina or Eve or any one of the dozen people who were sick last week. And what a plague it was! I felt like a dude in a NyQuil commercial (given to describing my suffering in florid similes) for like 3 days straight. I stayed home from work, playing Final Fantasy and creating a small mountain of Kleenexes, which I think freaked Randy out a little. And I've still got a sinus infection, which is turning my nostrils into taps for thick, yellow, acrid custard. Cheers!
My friend Squick came down to NYC from Boston on his vacation last Friday and stopped off at work to say hi. We hung out with PT at Bite and had some "drink," which was definitely welcome, given how awful and stressful work has been lately. I'd gotten my hair cut that day by my guy at Astor Hair, Edward, who looks and sounds like a Joe Sacco drawing and gives great haircuts but is utterly unemotive when it comes to pretty much everything. (While I was waiting on Friday, he was cutting the thick, spiky hair of this Asian kid, and he marveled, in a monotone, of course, "Your hair. So much. It like whole other head."
So we were talking about Edward and hair and the cutting of it, and this guy Elo who's a bouncer at Temple Bar came over and started extolling the benefits of shaving with a straight razor. He's kind of a big-shot in the Dominican Republic, he says -- he owns his own pool hall that he won off a guy -- and he's super into collecting razors and shaving paraphernalia. The pride of his collection is one of the razors belonging to the personal barber of Rafael Trujillo. "That guy was like our Hitler," Elo said. (Presumably he didn't mean the barber.) The razor's got this incredible mother-of-pearl handle, and, presumably, some genetic material belonging to the former dictator. "I'm going to restore it," he said. "Wouldn't a museum be interested in those flakes of skin?" I asked. "Nah," he said. "'s worth more if I clean it off." He told me I should Google him to find the forum he posts to in order to get his personal picks for shaving soap and astringents. "I'm like the seventh hit," he said. "He's right," said Squick. "Right after Electric Light Orchestra."
Apple picking got done on Saturday. We usually (well, for the past two years) go to a place called Wright's Farm in Ulster County, NY. That place is great, but it takes a really long time to get to, and we were kind of ready for a change. So this year we went to Riamede Farms, which is in New Jersey, and is just as nice, apple-wise, although they don't have a cool little cafe the way Wright's did, nor do they have dilly beans. Ted (driving) and Tom and 'Leen and Greg (down from MIT) came this time -- Katharine was in the middle of a hellish close at the 'xim, Emma's under the gun on her book, and Nina had midterms to cram for. And Katie just kind of inexplicably bowed out at the last moment. Still, we managed to have a great time -- the evidence is in my photostream. The apples were all huge and strangely luminous, and we ate and picked a ton. I got not one but two grasshoppers put down my shirt (though I may have squealed and cringed about twice as much as last year), and Ted gave himself a pretty deep cut by trying to yank a tough, fibrous weed out of the ground in the pumpkin patch. I don't know what I'm going to do with all my apples. A pie, prolly?
We convened at 680 afterwards to mull some cider and enjoy the material fruits of our fruit-labor -- and the previously absent ladies did show up for this -- but everybody was so exhausted that it wasn't really much of a shindig. Colleen called from her place a few minutes in and asked Tom if he could help her dispose of a rat she and her roommates had nabbed in a glue trap. Tom, not particularly relishing the idea of the actual, uh, disposal, asked if I wanted to help, and I'm all, you know, sure. So we head over there and the thing is kind of writing around in the trap grotesquely, stuck by it's legs, but also sort of keeled over and gummed up on its side. It can't really move much at all -- not a case for extraction, certainly. And it's definitely a rat (I'm a little skeptical of Nina's theory that there are no mice in New York, only baby Norwegian Browns); the shape of its head and back are pretty telltale. So Tom puts the thing in a plastic bag, and we head down to the street, wearing work gloves and filled with terrible purpose. I grab one of those big cobblestone things they use to line the planters the city plants trees in, and I just kind of bash the bag a whole bunch. That's not really a problem for me -- I'm a firm believer in putting things out of their misery -- but in mid-bash, a bunch of dirt flies off the cobblestone and gets in my mouth! And I'm all ack, pbthhh.
As the evening starts to wind down, I start feeling kind of unwell -- throat's all scratchy, nose is running -- and of course I think, oh god, I got plague from the rat bits! But not really. I got plague from Nina or Eve or any one of the dozen people who were sick last week. And what a plague it was! I felt like a dude in a NyQuil commercial (given to describing my suffering in florid similes) for like 3 days straight. I stayed home from work, playing Final Fantasy and creating a small mountain of Kleenexes, which I think freaked Randy out a little. And I've still got a sinus infection, which is turning my nostrils into taps for thick, yellow, acrid custard. Cheers!
Monday, October 15, 2007
That Cough Don't Sound Too Good, Marc Maron
It's actually a bit warm now, but last week was very cold. It made me strikingly sleepy (nothing like drowsing on the sofa during a cold, dry day), but it also stirred up, pretty strikingly, a bunch of memories from a few years ago. When I was at Wesleyan, I took a class on formal languages -- it was the first time I ever had to write serious proofs, and I spent a lot of time standing in front of one or another of the blackboards in the hall on the top floor of the Science Tower, trying to puzzle things out. Connecticut always seemed to get colder than New York. I'd shuffle from the Butterfield Colleges through the dead leaves up Church St., take the elevator up to the fourth floor of the (often) empty building, and then struggle to glimpse (and then retain) some relatively obscure truths about the nature of computation. In the clear, gray autumn light from the window, where I'd often find myself looking, you could see this kind of ocean of trees, the scope of which was kind of invisible from the ground. Very picturesque. I had this kind of ugly mottled brown sweater that I was wearing a lot those days. I'd bought it for (literally) fifty cents at a thrift store in town that sold cast-off stuff from hospitals. It was very warm, but I looked like a grandpa-in-training or some kind of weird eastern European.
The venerable Eve is now 26 years old. As with last year, we convened at Buttermilk to celebrate, and as with last year, Eve puked like a champ. The Star Wars pinball machine that caused problems for me last year was nowhere to be found, but Eve herself was a healthy terror, especially after she "rallied" -- the evening culminated in our drunken pursuit of her as she tore down 4th Ave., weaving from side to side in birthdatorial glee.
There's this weekly comedy show at Union Hall hosted by Michael Showalter and Eugene Mirman called Tearing The Veil Of Maya. I have no idea what that means, but the premise -- at least, I think -- is that it's for relatively well-known alternative comics to try out new material and talk about funny stuff that's happened to them during the week. Tom is fucking apeshit for it, and he goes every week. I've been twice now, and both times were fairly spectacular: The first time, Jim Gaffigan showed up (unannounced, I think) and did a whole set about how much loves bacon -- interspersed, of course, with his standard commentary from an imagined critical audience member (which sounds suspiciously close to the ultra-endearing "girl voice" that Tom and I do); last weekend they had Marc Maron, my all-time favorite comedian, bearded and intense and miserable, fresh from what he described as a terrible week in Edinburgh and a break-up with his (second) wife.
His delivery is such that I can't really remember more than a couple choice bits of his set (God speaking to him in Davey-and-Goliath voice; an extended simile about how dating women is like "sticking your cock into a hurricane"), but we (Tom and Colleen and Ted and Jill and I) were sitting in the second row, and intimidating eye contact was made throughout. At one point, he addressed a comment in the second person to some hypothetical hipster -- "I know what movie you're here to see with that haircut" -- while staring right at me. I don't even have a haircut right now! It's all over the place. Later on, warning the crowd that things were about to get weird, he took a guitar pick out of his pocket and winged it into the audience. It sort of boomeranged over my head and then landed squarely in my lap! I'm going to frame it, maybe? Not sure what to do.
Mike Birbiglia was up next. A bit stung, maybe, that Eugene Mirman had let Marc go really long, he explained that Marc was "the best comic," and that he's pretty much exactly the same off-stage -- except not funny. Seeing Marc lingering in the back of the room, he called out, "I slept with your wife!" "That's enough," said Marc, and promptly left.
This weekend is apple picking! I gotta go now -- I've got a meatloaf in the oven, my first ever, in honor of National Meat Loaf Appreciation Day.
The venerable Eve is now 26 years old. As with last year, we convened at Buttermilk to celebrate, and as with last year, Eve puked like a champ. The Star Wars pinball machine that caused problems for me last year was nowhere to be found, but Eve herself was a healthy terror, especially after she "rallied" -- the evening culminated in our drunken pursuit of her as she tore down 4th Ave., weaving from side to side in birthdatorial glee.
There's this weekly comedy show at Union Hall hosted by Michael Showalter and Eugene Mirman called Tearing The Veil Of Maya. I have no idea what that means, but the premise -- at least, I think -- is that it's for relatively well-known alternative comics to try out new material and talk about funny stuff that's happened to them during the week. Tom is fucking apeshit for it, and he goes every week. I've been twice now, and both times were fairly spectacular: The first time, Jim Gaffigan showed up (unannounced, I think) and did a whole set about how much loves bacon -- interspersed, of course, with his standard commentary from an imagined critical audience member (which sounds suspiciously close to the ultra-endearing "girl voice" that Tom and I do); last weekend they had Marc Maron, my all-time favorite comedian, bearded and intense and miserable, fresh from what he described as a terrible week in Edinburgh and a break-up with his (second) wife.
His delivery is such that I can't really remember more than a couple choice bits of his set (God speaking to him in Davey-and-Goliath voice; an extended simile about how dating women is like "sticking your cock into a hurricane"), but we (Tom and Colleen and Ted and Jill and I) were sitting in the second row, and intimidating eye contact was made throughout. At one point, he addressed a comment in the second person to some hypothetical hipster -- "I know what movie you're here to see with that haircut" -- while staring right at me. I don't even have a haircut right now! It's all over the place. Later on, warning the crowd that things were about to get weird, he took a guitar pick out of his pocket and winged it into the audience. It sort of boomeranged over my head and then landed squarely in my lap! I'm going to frame it, maybe? Not sure what to do.
Mike Birbiglia was up next. A bit stung, maybe, that Eugene Mirman had let Marc go really long, he explained that Marc was "the best comic," and that he's pretty much exactly the same off-stage -- except not funny. Seeing Marc lingering in the back of the room, he called out, "I slept with your wife!" "That's enough," said Marc, and promptly left.
This weekend is apple picking! I gotta go now -- I've got a meatloaf in the oven, my first ever, in honor of National Meat Loaf Appreciation Day.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Rice Milk
So, yeah, I made some horchata. Ingredients-wise, the stuff is pretty simple, except that the raw vanilla beans were expensive as fuck, like $5.99 for two at Whole Foods. Yes, I know. I know that I got hosed. But I put all the shit in to a blender and pureed it for a while, and then I emptied everything into the tea sock that I'd bought. And I thought it would just, you know, work from that point on, but the consistency of the mixture was such that it was holding in the water and not letting it seep through the sock. (Maybe I should've done it a cup or so at a time?) I ended up having to "milk" the bulging tea sock for about half an hour, squeezing the tip with my fingers as the rice water trickled out over my fingers and into a bowl. Ultimately, I ended up getting several cups out of it, and it was fucking delicious -- the best horchata I think I've ever had! It was rich and sort of spicy and not too sweet at all. But I don't know if I'll make it again any time soon.
Next up: Figuring out what to do with the nopales paddles and baggie of carne enchilada I bought at C-Town.
Eve and Nina and I have been going to this new bar called Quarter over on 20th St. and 5th Ave. The place is usually pretty empty, but it's very pretty inside, there's a good selection of booze, and the bartender's a real nice guy who never even complains when you order your fifth mashed basil drink that takes ten minutes to make. The three of us were there on Friday night, and, as y'do, I headed to the bathroom to take a piss. I finish my business and go to flush, but I guess someone had just been in there, 'cuz the toilet was still, you know, filling itself, because when I turn the handle, it doesn't do anything. So I thought maybe it was just one of those toilets where you have to turn the handle, you know, a little bit more. Some toilets are like that, man. So I gave it a bit of an extra turn, and the thing just snaps off in my hand.
On Saturday I went with Eve and Nina and Ted and some other people to see Arcade Fire out on Randall's Island. I'd never been there before, having skipped out on joining the track team in high school -- truth be told, I wasn't even 100% sure where it was. (It's in the East River, way up north 'round Harlem.) We took the D train all the way up, taking advantage of the super-express service after 59th St. in Manhattan. Unfortunately, on account of the enormous cup of coffee I drank that morning, or on account of I-don't-know-what, my stomach started having a major freak-out about half way up there, complete with the sweats and heart palpitations like you wouldn't believe. I really thought I was going to faint or have to puke. In classic Julian style, I just sort of sat there and fingered my vagus nerve until it was time to stagger up the stairs at 125th St. We're walking across town to the place where the special express bus was supposed to pick us up, past all the people hawking incense and black people genre fiction, and I'm feeling sick as a dog -- and I remember that I've left my ticket at home. Voyage of the fucking Pequod. So I call Ted and by the grace of God it turns out he hasn't managed to get rid of his extra ticket yet.
We get to the bus stop and it's a zoo. There's tons of hipsters and just not enough buses. There are, however, a bunch of erstwhile livery cab drivers looking to make a killing. One of them offers us a flat rate of $40 a head to get across the bridge, which I think is too much, but to which the other members of our party agree. I sweat my way through the ride, and then we get to the entrance, with a two-tier security check-in. Nina and Eve go in without me in order to retrieve the ticket from Ted, and I pace around, sweating and belching and feeling awful. But everything ends up sorted out, and I get a $7 beer in me and start feeling a whole hell of a lot better, and Nina and I get to plotz out in the middle of the field while she bravely homphs a tzatziki sauce-drenched burrito she's bought at one of the vendors lining either side of the main grassy bit. Randall's Island is very pretty and much greener than I thought it would be. And even though there were tons of people there and the stage was super far away, they've got a great PA system and these two huge projection screens set up on either side of the stage that display helpful (if needlessly arty) close-ups of the action.
By the time Nina and I met up with the rest of the group, LCD Soundsystem were going on. I'm not their hugest fan, but they played all different kinds of songs, some of them quite good, and their lead singer had plenty of energy.
Arcade Fire, though -- those guys are amazing. Their visual aesthetic alone is worth the price of admission: It's this Amish goth thing, kind of like they're the Addams Family's cousins from rural Canada. Win and Régine always both have the same distracted, fearful look on their faces, even when Régine's stomping around the stage like a hot little chimp. The sound was great, and the set list was pretty much the same as when I saw them at Radio City -- focusing heavily on the excellent Neon Bible. Their songs are catchy as hell, but the tone, melodically and lyrically, is so grim and spooky that there's this hard-to-shake... dread feeling that comes over me when I listen. Is that just me? The band doesn't seem to be affected -- they were cavorting all over the stage as usual, laying waste to various components of the drum kit in the process. At one particularly exciting point towards the end, Will Butler grabbed one of the floor toms (I think) and started climbing up the stage scaffolding while playing it. He got about a story and a half up when the stick flew out of his hand into the crowd below. He made a wild grab for it and looked for a second like he might lose his grip. But he didn't.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da... Black mirror!
There was a guy standing in front of us through most of it who looked like a cross between Tom O'Donnell and Zach Galifianakis. And he was a total dipshit, kind of smirking and muttering to his friends about how lame it was that everyone was singing and dancing around. Guy, don't go to a rock concert if you're not into that. "Liiiees, liiiees," right into Ted's ear.
After the thing was over we opted to take the foot path back up to the Triborough and walked to Queens. We debated getting a drink, but everyone was exhausted. And apparently we left a tad too early.
Next up: Figuring out what to do with the nopales paddles and baggie of carne enchilada I bought at C-Town.
Eve and Nina and I have been going to this new bar called Quarter over on 20th St. and 5th Ave. The place is usually pretty empty, but it's very pretty inside, there's a good selection of booze, and the bartender's a real nice guy who never even complains when you order your fifth mashed basil drink that takes ten minutes to make. The three of us were there on Friday night, and, as y'do, I headed to the bathroom to take a piss. I finish my business and go to flush, but I guess someone had just been in there, 'cuz the toilet was still, you know, filling itself, because when I turn the handle, it doesn't do anything. So I thought maybe it was just one of those toilets where you have to turn the handle, you know, a little bit more. Some toilets are like that, man. So I gave it a bit of an extra turn, and the thing just snaps off in my hand.
On Saturday I went with Eve and Nina and Ted and some other people to see Arcade Fire out on Randall's Island. I'd never been there before, having skipped out on joining the track team in high school -- truth be told, I wasn't even 100% sure where it was. (It's in the East River, way up north 'round Harlem.) We took the D train all the way up, taking advantage of the super-express service after 59th St. in Manhattan. Unfortunately, on account of the enormous cup of coffee I drank that morning, or on account of I-don't-know-what, my stomach started having a major freak-out about half way up there, complete with the sweats and heart palpitations like you wouldn't believe. I really thought I was going to faint or have to puke. In classic Julian style, I just sort of sat there and fingered my vagus nerve until it was time to stagger up the stairs at 125th St. We're walking across town to the place where the special express bus was supposed to pick us up, past all the people hawking incense and black people genre fiction, and I'm feeling sick as a dog -- and I remember that I've left my ticket at home. Voyage of the fucking Pequod. So I call Ted and by the grace of God it turns out he hasn't managed to get rid of his extra ticket yet.
We get to the bus stop and it's a zoo. There's tons of hipsters and just not enough buses. There are, however, a bunch of erstwhile livery cab drivers looking to make a killing. One of them offers us a flat rate of $40 a head to get across the bridge, which I think is too much, but to which the other members of our party agree. I sweat my way through the ride, and then we get to the entrance, with a two-tier security check-in. Nina and Eve go in without me in order to retrieve the ticket from Ted, and I pace around, sweating and belching and feeling awful. But everything ends up sorted out, and I get a $7 beer in me and start feeling a whole hell of a lot better, and Nina and I get to plotz out in the middle of the field while she bravely homphs a tzatziki sauce-drenched burrito she's bought at one of the vendors lining either side of the main grassy bit. Randall's Island is very pretty and much greener than I thought it would be. And even though there were tons of people there and the stage was super far away, they've got a great PA system and these two huge projection screens set up on either side of the stage that display helpful (if needlessly arty) close-ups of the action.
By the time Nina and I met up with the rest of the group, LCD Soundsystem were going on. I'm not their hugest fan, but they played all different kinds of songs, some of them quite good, and their lead singer had plenty of energy.
Arcade Fire, though -- those guys are amazing. Their visual aesthetic alone is worth the price of admission: It's this Amish goth thing, kind of like they're the Addams Family's cousins from rural Canada. Win and Régine always both have the same distracted, fearful look on their faces, even when Régine's stomping around the stage like a hot little chimp. The sound was great, and the set list was pretty much the same as when I saw them at Radio City -- focusing heavily on the excellent Neon Bible. Their songs are catchy as hell, but the tone, melodically and lyrically, is so grim and spooky that there's this hard-to-shake... dread feeling that comes over me when I listen. Is that just me? The band doesn't seem to be affected -- they were cavorting all over the stage as usual, laying waste to various components of the drum kit in the process. At one particularly exciting point towards the end, Will Butler grabbed one of the floor toms (I think) and started climbing up the stage scaffolding while playing it. He got about a story and a half up when the stick flew out of his hand into the crowd below. He made a wild grab for it and looked for a second like he might lose his grip. But he didn't.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da... Black mirror!
There was a guy standing in front of us through most of it who looked like a cross between Tom O'Donnell and Zach Galifianakis. And he was a total dipshit, kind of smirking and muttering to his friends about how lame it was that everyone was singing and dancing around. Guy, don't go to a rock concert if you're not into that. "Liiiees, liiiees," right into Ted's ear.
After the thing was over we opted to take the foot path back up to the Triborough and walked to Queens. We debated getting a drink, but everyone was exhausted. And apparently we left a tad too early.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
It really is. This is my favorite kind of weather. Everything seems kind of clear and sharp, and the temperature is perfect for, you know, actually thinking about stuff. Plus, this is when all of my favorite things happen -- going back to school (used to get psyched about this when I was a kid); apple picking; Halloween; Thanksgiving.
So I haven't posted in a while. Sorry! Laziness, really.
The Monday before last Nina and I went to go see Bjork at Madison Square Garden. We showed up a little late, thinking there'd be more openers than there were, but we got to have a delicious dinner (the remnants of which they made us throw away at MSG) at Grand Sichuan beforehand. The pink peppercorns in my broccoli dish made my lips tingle! It was actually a little scary. So I'd never been to the Garden -- it's intimidatingly huge inside the arena, but the stage is just sort of set up on top of the wood court, so the whole thing feels a little like a band playing in a high school gym. I'm not a huge Bjork fan (neither, Nina speculates, were most of the dudes who were there that night), and our seats were such that we couldn't see *that* well, but the stage and costumes were pretty sweet, and she's got a great voice (pretty sure she was actually singing the whole time) and a ton of energy. I found some closer-up pics up the thing here.
I put in a bunch more hours over the weekend (holy shit I was clocking like 80-something) and finished Dragon Quest VIII; I did not get that empty feeling some people get after beating a game. I initially had some contempt for the game -- it's a little too cute, and it begins very much in media res, which I assumed was some kind of bullshit Japanese storytelling thing -- you know, that we're just supposed to get from the title that the game is about, you know, an archetypal "Cursed King," and that should be good enough to get us through the narrative. It turns out, of course, that the game's a fair bit cannier than that, and the plot and the metaphysics of the game universe are reorganized about half way through in a pretty subtle and pleasant way. Sorry, Japan! Now I'm playing FFXII, which I picked up on sale a few weeks ago but hadn't yet cracked open. In terms of the art direction, it seems like something I've always wanted to play: A Byzantine fantasy in every sense. I'll reserve judgment on the rest of it 'til I'm a bit deeper in.
Kind of a whirlwind of a day on Sunday. To start off, Eve and I went to go check out the Chili Pepper Fiesta at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The garden is always beautiful (although I'm conflicted over whether it's worth $8 to go see), but this festival was no great shakes. The main attraction seemed to be a big tent set up with tables where you could go and taste (and hopefully buy) the wares of local chili gourmands -- salsa, fudge, etc. Maybe we showed up too late. We showed up a bit late to the Atlantic Antic, too, which we hit up next, as most of the vendors were closing up shop. Managed to pick up a cool t-shirt for Nina at the Cut It Out table (thought they had a web site, but now I can't find it) and ate some delicious fish cakes. We also ran into my friend Arthur (a.k.a. Arturo) from Wesleyan.
Arthur's a nice guy -- I was in a couple of plays with him at Wesleyan, and although I don't share his passion for Harold Lloyd-style "clowning," I was more than happy to help him out on this film project he did one year over Christmas. Nina and I had just been discussing the relative probabilities that either of us would turn up on the YouTube, and I'd pegged mine pretty low. Well, I was wrong. For those of you who've seen Pete Hagan's epic New-Wave senior project, The Zombies Win, I should point out that in this film, Somni, I'm maybe 60% as effeminate but like twice as beaky (lit'rally):
Last night I dragged my friend Jason from work with me to Chinatown to this Thai grocery store, where I was shopping for ingredients to make horchata, a delicious, rice-based dessert drink they serve at Mexican places. It's a pain to have to go to a restaurant when you want some, and the stuff they sell off the shelf at the carnicerias is disgusting. So I'm soaking the ingredients now and I'll blend it up tonight and give it a taste. After I found as much of the stuff as I could, Jason insisted I come over to his house to taste some whiskey -- this is a thing he does with work friends; it was finally my turn last night. I tried four different whiskeys, really liked three (the icky fourth, from Laphroiag, tasted really strongly of band-aids and beef jerky), and we listened to a bunch of Pogues songs.
They're making my favorite game, Bigger Scumbag, into a TV show!
Going to see Arcade Fire at Randall's Island on Saturday. Shamefully enough, I have never been (to the Island).
So I haven't posted in a while. Sorry! Laziness, really.
The Monday before last Nina and I went to go see Bjork at Madison Square Garden. We showed up a little late, thinking there'd be more openers than there were, but we got to have a delicious dinner (the remnants of which they made us throw away at MSG) at Grand Sichuan beforehand. The pink peppercorns in my broccoli dish made my lips tingle! It was actually a little scary. So I'd never been to the Garden -- it's intimidatingly huge inside the arena, but the stage is just sort of set up on top of the wood court, so the whole thing feels a little like a band playing in a high school gym. I'm not a huge Bjork fan (neither, Nina speculates, were most of the dudes who were there that night), and our seats were such that we couldn't see *that* well, but the stage and costumes were pretty sweet, and she's got a great voice (pretty sure she was actually singing the whole time) and a ton of energy. I found some closer-up pics up the thing here.
I put in a bunch more hours over the weekend (holy shit I was clocking like 80-something) and finished Dragon Quest VIII; I did not get that empty feeling some people get after beating a game. I initially had some contempt for the game -- it's a little too cute, and it begins very much in media res, which I assumed was some kind of bullshit Japanese storytelling thing -- you know, that we're just supposed to get from the title that the game is about, you know, an archetypal "Cursed King," and that should be good enough to get us through the narrative. It turns out, of course, that the game's a fair bit cannier than that, and the plot and the metaphysics of the game universe are reorganized about half way through in a pretty subtle and pleasant way. Sorry, Japan! Now I'm playing FFXII, which I picked up on sale a few weeks ago but hadn't yet cracked open. In terms of the art direction, it seems like something I've always wanted to play: A Byzantine fantasy in every sense. I'll reserve judgment on the rest of it 'til I'm a bit deeper in.
Kind of a whirlwind of a day on Sunday. To start off, Eve and I went to go check out the Chili Pepper Fiesta at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The garden is always beautiful (although I'm conflicted over whether it's worth $8 to go see), but this festival was no great shakes. The main attraction seemed to be a big tent set up with tables where you could go and taste (and hopefully buy) the wares of local chili gourmands -- salsa, fudge, etc. Maybe we showed up too late. We showed up a bit late to the Atlantic Antic, too, which we hit up next, as most of the vendors were closing up shop. Managed to pick up a cool t-shirt for Nina at the Cut It Out table (thought they had a web site, but now I can't find it) and ate some delicious fish cakes. We also ran into my friend Arthur (a.k.a. Arturo) from Wesleyan.
Arthur's a nice guy -- I was in a couple of plays with him at Wesleyan, and although I don't share his passion for Harold Lloyd-style "clowning," I was more than happy to help him out on this film project he did one year over Christmas. Nina and I had just been discussing the relative probabilities that either of us would turn up on the YouTube, and I'd pegged mine pretty low. Well, I was wrong. For those of you who've seen Pete Hagan's epic New-Wave senior project, The Zombies Win, I should point out that in this film, Somni, I'm maybe 60% as effeminate but like twice as beaky (lit'rally):
- Part 1: http://youtube.com/watch?v=faRZoSYyxYE
- Part 2: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ljK-JTf1HgQ
- Part 3: http://youtube.com/watch?v=OFhIqAMo_kU
Last night I dragged my friend Jason from work with me to Chinatown to this Thai grocery store, where I was shopping for ingredients to make horchata, a delicious, rice-based dessert drink they serve at Mexican places. It's a pain to have to go to a restaurant when you want some, and the stuff they sell off the shelf at the carnicerias is disgusting. So I'm soaking the ingredients now and I'll blend it up tonight and give it a taste. After I found as much of the stuff as I could, Jason insisted I come over to his house to taste some whiskey -- this is a thing he does with work friends; it was finally my turn last night. I tried four different whiskeys, really liked three (the icky fourth, from Laphroiag, tasted really strongly of band-aids and beef jerky), and we listened to a bunch of Pogues songs.
They're making my favorite game, Bigger Scumbag, into a TV show!
Going to see Arcade Fire at Randall's Island on Saturday. Shamefully enough, I have never been (to the Island).
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Plantas
Randy's back, after going to California for 10 days. Did I make use of the "free house" in his absence? No. My mom gave me some plants for the apartment; she said they weren't going to survive the winter at my parents' place. It's like a jungle in here now!
Have I mentioned that I totally love Sunset Park? This is kind of the first neighborhood that I've lived in that I haven't felt like an outsider in for, you know, class reasons. Park Slope and Prospect Heights always felt like temporary nesting ground -- it's hard to feel like a real part of those neighborhoods if you're not personally invested in real estate and the, you know, trance state of upper middle class entitlement. And I know the fact that I've moved in pretty much means the secret is out on this place and that there's been this low rumble from condominium developers about this being the Year Of Sunset Park, but I haven't started to get stroller vibes from the neighborhood yet. In fact, as I mentioned to Nina, I sort of feel like Paul Atreides -- no, not in some creepy colonialist way, but in the sense that the Spice Michoacán has turned my eyes blue. I mean, fuck, my cupboard's stocked with todos las cosas de Goya, and in the fridge I've got a gross little baggie of charales, a six-pack of Presidente, and three different flavors of Yucateco.
That being said, I spent an hour last night combing the freezer aisles of the bodegas and carnicerias on 5th Ave. looking for Goya frozen taquitos (the previously-disappointing dryness of which I'd decided would be perfectly mitigated by this bottle of Goya mole sauce I bought at Key Food) without any success whatsoever (and I know Steve's C-Town has 'em). Nor did the liquor store have any Jameson. The worst of both worlds.
So the Summer is pretty much over. We set out to do a bunch of stuff back at the beginning of June; some of it we got to, some not so much. I saw these bands:
But now it's autumn, which is actually my favorite season! Leave the fire behind, watch the world die, etc. Pick some apples.
Some kind people have put a whole fuck of a lot of episodes of Ricky Gervais' XFM shows and Stephen Merchant's new Radio 6 show, The Steve Show, online. I've been downloading and listening, several times a day. I just like hearing people talk.
Have I mentioned that I totally love Sunset Park? This is kind of the first neighborhood that I've lived in that I haven't felt like an outsider in for, you know, class reasons. Park Slope and Prospect Heights always felt like temporary nesting ground -- it's hard to feel like a real part of those neighborhoods if you're not personally invested in real estate and the, you know, trance state of upper middle class entitlement. And I know the fact that I've moved in pretty much means the secret is out on this place and that there's been this low rumble from condominium developers about this being the Year Of Sunset Park, but I haven't started to get stroller vibes from the neighborhood yet. In fact, as I mentioned to Nina, I sort of feel like Paul Atreides -- no, not in some creepy colonialist way, but in the sense that the Spice Michoacán has turned my eyes blue. I mean, fuck, my cupboard's stocked with todos las cosas de Goya, and in the fridge I've got a gross little baggie of charales, a six-pack of Presidente, and three different flavors of Yucateco.
That being said, I spent an hour last night combing the freezer aisles of the bodegas and carnicerias on 5th Ave. looking for Goya frozen taquitos (the previously-disappointing dryness of which I'd decided would be perfectly mitigated by this bottle of Goya mole sauce I bought at Key Food) without any success whatsoever (and I know Steve's C-Town has 'em). Nor did the liquor store have any Jameson. The worst of both worlds.
So the Summer is pretty much over. We set out to do a bunch of stuff back at the beginning of June; some of it we got to, some not so much. I saw these bands:
- The Horrors
- The Fucking Champs
- Direct From Hollywood Cemetery (twice)
- NullSleep, Bit Shifter
- Spoon
- Ralph Stanley
- Violent Femmes
- They Might Be Giants
- Peelander-Z, Go!Go!7188
- The Hold Steady
- The Thermals, Ted Leo
- MC Frontalot
But now it's autumn, which is actually my favorite season! Leave the fire behind, watch the world die, etc. Pick some apples.
Some kind people have put a whole fuck of a lot of episodes of Ricky Gervais' XFM shows and Stephen Merchant's new Radio 6 show, The Steve Show, online. I've been downloading and listening, several times a day. I just like hearing people talk.
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Library of Babel
So, yeah, I went to go see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery at Rock Star Bar last Monday, after trivia (this guy Dave from my office and I bombed as The Heaps), and they were amazing, as usual. And I still can't fathom what they're doing playing a Monday night show with horrible openers at a frankly kind of dumpy venue. I asked The Vegetable this question, too, having run into him on the way out, and he said he had no fucking clue, either, but that they've got a new album coming out that's going to rock. He let me keep one of his drum sticks that had gone flying from his kit during a particularly enthusiastic finale for Boiler Room. Nina came, too -- she's well-connected with these guys, surprisingly enough, since the bass player has done some work for Seed.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Nerd Rock
I tire, babies. I didn't sleep that well last night.
What's happened? Last weekend, Eve and I played Scrabble in Greenwood Cemetery. It was very beautiful. I almost, for the first time in my life, used all of my Scrabble letters by spelling out 'wolverine,' but was thwarted.
On Tuesday, I went to go see Peelander-Z and Go!Go!7188 at The Knitting Factory. Go!Go! is from Tokyo, but I'd seen flyers for the 'lander for years and had been curious about their live show. It turns out that they're a little bit, uh, sloppy, but their enthusiasm and the variety and quality of their props pretty well makes up for it -- they're like a manic tricolor Japanese Carrot Top! They led off with a song called "Mad Tiger," during which all three band members donned these awesome, realistically-furred tiger masks. Then there was an interlude in which the gap-toothed lead singer removed his yellow helmet and called up volunteers from the audience to help him scissor off his remaining tendrils of hair. Then they played more songs, the drummer and bass player holding up white cardboard placards with the titles on them, presumably for the benefit of the audience. For their last song, "Health," they invited a bunch of audience members up on stage, this time to play the instruments while they cavorted in the crowd. The yellow dude quick-changed into this bowling pin costume and kept charging and pile-driving the red guy while their merch lady (whose jumpsuit was pink) refereed.
Go!Go!7188 was really very good -- their lead singer, Yuu, has a great set of pipes, even though she's pretty small, and the band is incredibly tight, musically.
On Thursday, Mike Frank came up from D.C. and he and Eve and I went to see The Hold Steady in Prospect Park. They were characteristically energetic -- even though a lot of their songs are a bit too down-tempo, or, I don't know, meandering for me, it's kind of impossible not to be in a good mood while you're watching them. The crowd was psyched, and Craig Finn was doing his trademark shout-unintelligible-stuff-off-mic thing (what is he saying?). He was wearing a baseball jersey given to him personally by Kent Hrbek, I think he said. They didn't play as long as they did at the show of theirs I saw at Warsaw, nor did they drink as much, really, but I think the Celebrate Brooklyn people had to get people home; also it was raining, kind of.
Last night the folks at 680 threw a barbecue. I borrowed Eve's bicycle and Nina and I went around Prospect Park a couple of times before heading down to the party. We saw a whole bunch of fireflies in the park, as well as two bats and a bunny.
Today was the big Thermals / Ted Leo show in McCarren Park Pool. Nina and I got there kind of late, on account of we were kind of hung over and tired and sick-feeling from the activities of yesterday, so we got there just in time to hear The Thermals wrapping up, but that's okay. We were eating sushi. Ted Leo, though, was excellent, as usual and despite the heat, which must have been unbearable up on stage. I'd never been to one of these Jelly NYC pool parties before, and I don't know what I think about them -- they've got enclosures set up for water polo and dodgeball, there's a Slip 'n Slide, and, thankfully, a cooling-off tent with these big fans that kind of spray water at you; and as a result the space is so big and distracting that you don't get the kind of critical mass, crowd-wise that really makes for a good rock show. Nonetheless, they were loud and fast and really tight. It was the bass player's last show with the band, so they did Counting Down The Hours as an encore, since it's apparently his favorite song. I think it might be my favorite song, too!
On the way home from the show, after Nina detrained to go get dinner with her bro and her dad, I bought some stuff at Trader Joe's and then got on the N, which was running local, infuriatingly, as it's been doing recently. I sat down next to a young man and woman who were engaged in animated conversation. I wasn't really paying attention at first, and when the woman started saying, "Kids want different experiences, they want to experience stuff -- electronically, or outdoors, whatever -- it's about experience-hopping," I thought she was talking about, you know, child psychology or teaching or something. But she wasn't. Her male companion took the ball and ran with it: "Right, definitely. So it should be like, 'You can take Go-Gurt to the beach, you can take it underwater, or, uh, in a boat, you can take it to Space Camp..." These were ad people, working after hours on a campaign for Go-Gurt, the yogurt-like acrylic paint you drink out of a condom!
"Yeah," the woman said, "we should have pictures of all the places you can take Go-Gurt, you know, photos or illustrations..." The dude cut in with "I think where all this Dr. Seuss kind of stuff is leading us, though, is that there's nowhere you can't take Go-Gurt. I mean, maybe we give it as a challenge -- show us a place you think you can't take Go-Gurt and we'll show you that you can. And, you know, this is really something we should let the 'creatives' take care of -- because we're not creatives. But, in a way, we are." They went on like this for some time, waxing philosophical on the "portability" merits of Go-Gurt, to the exclusion of all other topics, except for one point, when, after a brief pause in the conversation, the woman started expounding on the virtue of... herself, in a kind of frightening tone of voice. "They're going to love me. I mean, they already love me, but they don't know what I can do. I didn't know what I could do, but now that I do, nothing can stop me." The last thing I heard, as they got off at 9th St. (to return to the apartment that they apparently shared?) was the guy asking the girl, the concern in his voice actually kind of plausible, "Wait, are you proposing a redesign of the product?"
"No," she assured him. "I'm not trying to change the tube experience."
Danica moved out, slightly ahead of schedule -- surprise funeral upstate this weekend, she's flying back to CA tomorrow to start the fall semester as planned. This is kind of sad; she was a good roommate. But tomorrow is Vampire Hollywood at Rock Star Bar!
What's happened? Last weekend, Eve and I played Scrabble in Greenwood Cemetery. It was very beautiful. I almost, for the first time in my life, used all of my Scrabble letters by spelling out 'wolverine,' but was thwarted.
On Tuesday, I went to go see Peelander-Z and Go!Go!7188 at The Knitting Factory. Go!Go! is from Tokyo, but I'd seen flyers for the 'lander for years and had been curious about their live show. It turns out that they're a little bit, uh, sloppy, but their enthusiasm and the variety and quality of their props pretty well makes up for it -- they're like a manic tricolor Japanese Carrot Top! They led off with a song called "Mad Tiger," during which all three band members donned these awesome, realistically-furred tiger masks. Then there was an interlude in which the gap-toothed lead singer removed his yellow helmet and called up volunteers from the audience to help him scissor off his remaining tendrils of hair. Then they played more songs, the drummer and bass player holding up white cardboard placards with the titles on them, presumably for the benefit of the audience. For their last song, "Health," they invited a bunch of audience members up on stage, this time to play the instruments while they cavorted in the crowd. The yellow dude quick-changed into this bowling pin costume and kept charging and pile-driving the red guy while their merch lady (whose jumpsuit was pink) refereed.
Go!Go!7188 was really very good -- their lead singer, Yuu, has a great set of pipes, even though she's pretty small, and the band is incredibly tight, musically.
On Thursday, Mike Frank came up from D.C. and he and Eve and I went to see The Hold Steady in Prospect Park. They were characteristically energetic -- even though a lot of their songs are a bit too down-tempo, or, I don't know, meandering for me, it's kind of impossible not to be in a good mood while you're watching them. The crowd was psyched, and Craig Finn was doing his trademark shout-unintelligible-stuff-off-mic thing (what is he saying?). He was wearing a baseball jersey given to him personally by Kent Hrbek, I think he said. They didn't play as long as they did at the show of theirs I saw at Warsaw, nor did they drink as much, really, but I think the Celebrate Brooklyn people had to get people home; also it was raining, kind of.
Last night the folks at 680 threw a barbecue. I borrowed Eve's bicycle and Nina and I went around Prospect Park a couple of times before heading down to the party. We saw a whole bunch of fireflies in the park, as well as two bats and a bunny.
Today was the big Thermals / Ted Leo show in McCarren Park Pool. Nina and I got there kind of late, on account of we were kind of hung over and tired and sick-feeling from the activities of yesterday, so we got there just in time to hear The Thermals wrapping up, but that's okay. We were eating sushi. Ted Leo, though, was excellent, as usual and despite the heat, which must have been unbearable up on stage. I'd never been to one of these Jelly NYC pool parties before, and I don't know what I think about them -- they've got enclosures set up for water polo and dodgeball, there's a Slip 'n Slide, and, thankfully, a cooling-off tent with these big fans that kind of spray water at you; and as a result the space is so big and distracting that you don't get the kind of critical mass, crowd-wise that really makes for a good rock show. Nonetheless, they were loud and fast and really tight. It was the bass player's last show with the band, so they did Counting Down The Hours as an encore, since it's apparently his favorite song. I think it might be my favorite song, too!
On the way home from the show, after Nina detrained to go get dinner with her bro and her dad, I bought some stuff at Trader Joe's and then got on the N, which was running local, infuriatingly, as it's been doing recently. I sat down next to a young man and woman who were engaged in animated conversation. I wasn't really paying attention at first, and when the woman started saying, "Kids want different experiences, they want to experience stuff -- electronically, or outdoors, whatever -- it's about experience-hopping," I thought she was talking about, you know, child psychology or teaching or something. But she wasn't. Her male companion took the ball and ran with it: "Right, definitely. So it should be like, 'You can take Go-Gurt to the beach, you can take it underwater, or, uh, in a boat, you can take it to Space Camp..." These were ad people, working after hours on a campaign for Go-Gurt, the yogurt-like acrylic paint you drink out of a condom!
"Yeah," the woman said, "we should have pictures of all the places you can take Go-Gurt, you know, photos or illustrations..." The dude cut in with "I think where all this Dr. Seuss kind of stuff is leading us, though, is that there's nowhere you can't take Go-Gurt. I mean, maybe we give it as a challenge -- show us a place you think you can't take Go-Gurt and we'll show you that you can. And, you know, this is really something we should let the 'creatives' take care of -- because we're not creatives. But, in a way, we are." They went on like this for some time, waxing philosophical on the "portability" merits of Go-Gurt, to the exclusion of all other topics, except for one point, when, after a brief pause in the conversation, the woman started expounding on the virtue of... herself, in a kind of frightening tone of voice. "They're going to love me. I mean, they already love me, but they don't know what I can do. I didn't know what I could do, but now that I do, nothing can stop me." The last thing I heard, as they got off at 9th St. (to return to the apartment that they apparently shared?) was the guy asking the girl, the concern in his voice actually kind of plausible, "Wait, are you proposing a redesign of the product?"
"No," she assured him. "I'm not trying to change the tube experience."
Danica moved out, slightly ahead of schedule -- surprise funeral upstate this weekend, she's flying back to CA tomorrow to start the fall semester as planned. This is kind of sad; she was a good roommate. But tomorrow is Vampire Hollywood at Rock Star Bar!
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
If It's Horrible, It Exists
Drink, drink, drink.
Nina and I went to the They Might Be Giants show at the 'Ballroom, albeit with Nina's brother Michael and his friend Ari instead of Randy and Danica. It was great! The Johns described the show as being a collection of lesser-played material of theirs from the 90s, and, you know, true to their word, I didn't really know any of the songs -- except for one that my friend Kim put on a mix tape that she gave me in high school to cheer me up. I quote it here because it's a nice example of how stirringly cute their lyrics are, not to mention the hooks:
After the show we followed Michael and Ari over to this Thai bar with a name I can't remember in the West Village to see a childhood friend of Michael's playing blues (raw, acoustic) at, I guess, a sort of open mic dealie. He was very good, but I don't remember his name. What I do remember is that somebody peed on the street afterwards. I won't say who!
One thing I forgot to mention last time was a birthday thing. Eve got me a pair of tickets to go on a "working harbor" tour of the East River, and Nina and I did it. The thing was held on a big yacht that served booze and was equipped with a sound system so the guides (who were kind of like a maritime Click & Clack Tappit) could explain things about container shipping. We left from Pier 16 and got a peek at the Brooklyn Navy Yards before turning around and heading South towards Red Hook and Staten Island. Red Hook had a bunch of beautiful old fire-gutted piers and warehouses. We took some pictures, but most of them came out blurry. Down by Staten Island is a kind of tugboat harbor that the guides were really fascinated with. We got to a see a bunch of tugboats hauling loads around. They can push or pull their barges, but they can also drag them along from the side -- wouldn't've thought that was physically doable. Of all the things we saw, my favorite was this one bit of the fuel tanker docks that had this enormous grid draped with colorful hoses used for routing the payload of the tankers to the proper holding facilities: an Ethernet pinout writ large!
I went to a few more movies at the McCarren Park Pool summerscreen film series, which is turning out to be a wonderful alternative, lineup-wise, to the packed clusterfuck that is Bryant Park. It's a beautiful space, rarely very crowded, and Schnack does the cooking. Most recently, I was there for:
I did an exhausting thing yesterday that I can't really talk about on the ol' blog. Maybe I'll talk about later. Suffice it to say that I'm exhausted. I have the day off today and I've spent it lying around, eating and playing video games. I'm watching The Killing Fields right now, but not really giving it 100% of my attention.
Nina and I went to the They Might Be Giants show at the 'Ballroom, albeit with Nina's brother Michael and his friend Ari instead of Randy and Danica. It was great! The Johns described the show as being a collection of lesser-played material of theirs from the 90s, and, you know, true to their word, I didn't really know any of the songs -- except for one that my friend Kim put on a mix tape that she gave me in high school to cheer me up. I quote it here because it's a nice example of how stirringly cute their lyrics are, not to mention the hooks:
I returned a bag of groceriesThe hooks! They're so clean and catchy, these songs. It put me in mind, as a lot of things do, of the songs The Headliners used to play -- pairing up a catchy melody (the less complicated the instrumentation of which the better) with a good-faith exploration of a silly idea. That's a formula I haven't yet lost respect for. I don't know if I ever will!
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the expiration date
I came back as a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the date stamped on myself
Did a large procession wave their
Torches as my head fell in the basket
And was everybody dancing on the casket?
Now it's over, I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want
Or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do
After the show we followed Michael and Ari over to this Thai bar with a name I can't remember in the West Village to see a childhood friend of Michael's playing blues (raw, acoustic) at, I guess, a sort of open mic dealie. He was very good, but I don't remember his name. What I do remember is that somebody peed on the street afterwards. I won't say who!
One thing I forgot to mention last time was a birthday thing. Eve got me a pair of tickets to go on a "working harbor" tour of the East River, and Nina and I did it. The thing was held on a big yacht that served booze and was equipped with a sound system so the guides (who were kind of like a maritime Click & Clack Tappit) could explain things about container shipping. We left from Pier 16 and got a peek at the Brooklyn Navy Yards before turning around and heading South towards Red Hook and Staten Island. Red Hook had a bunch of beautiful old fire-gutted piers and warehouses. We took some pictures, but most of them came out blurry. Down by Staten Island is a kind of tugboat harbor that the guides were really fascinated with. We got to a see a bunch of tugboats hauling loads around. They can push or pull their barges, but they can also drag them along from the side -- wouldn't've thought that was physically doable. Of all the things we saw, my favorite was this one bit of the fuel tanker docks that had this enormous grid draped with colorful hoses used for routing the payload of the tankers to the proper holding facilities: an Ethernet pinout writ large!
I went to a few more movies at the McCarren Park Pool summerscreen film series, which is turning out to be a wonderful alternative, lineup-wise, to the packed clusterfuck that is Bryant Park. It's a beautiful space, rarely very crowded, and Schnack does the cooking. Most recently, I was there for:
- Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which is a weird and wonderful little punk rock gem that I'd never heard (neither has Netflix). It kind of falls apart, plot- and message-wise, in the final act, but all the characters are played convincingly and earnestly -- the whole thing's got enormous heart. Plus Ray Winstone's one of the leads. Who knew?
- Repo Man, which should have been infuriating, given that it just kind of throws together pretty much every punk movie theme -- the only thing missing, debatably, is a zombie invasion -- but somehow avoided being glib. I really liked it! Tight pacing, clever dialogue, shit acting.
I did an exhausting thing yesterday that I can't really talk about on the ol' blog. Maybe I'll talk about later. Suffice it to say that I'm exhausted. I have the day off today and I've spent it lying around, eating and playing video games. I'm watching The Killing Fields right now, but not really giving it 100% of my attention.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
I'm Killing A Vampire
Short and to-the-point, because I haven't written in a while and many things have happened:
Nina and I managed to get through Caligula -- yes, that Caligula -- which is long and disturbing but not particularly sexy (although I was inexplicably aroused by the scene where Malcolm MacDowell fondles the tits of this old lady) or good. I am making her watch (the extended versions of) The Lord of the Rings.
My friend Squick, who'd moved to Boston, came back to NYC a few weeks ago, in part to celebrate the birthday of P.T., the 40-year-old (well, 41 now?) Thai guy who runs Bite, the sandwich shop that's sort of across the street from where I work. P.T.'d invited me to come along, too, so I did -- and it was a blast. It was me and Squick and some other guys from work and about a dozen Thai dudes I didn't know at this restaurant on 50th St. called Pooket. P.T. and his friend Peter ordered a bunch of stuff off-menu, like some really good spicy Lahb and some (also spicy) mango salad. Around eleven, the wait staff closed the front door and put on the karaoke machine in the back. I did the Ghostbusters theme song and some Thai songs I didn't, believe it or not, actually know the words to.
And then it was my birthday, precious; Sophie and I did another joint fiesta, and, while I was apprehensive about how it'd go, especially considering that she and I haven't really seen much of each other over the past year, it came off swimmingly and nobody got food poisoning. Nina scored a tres-leches cake from this really good local bakery (they were out of the Dora The Exporer cake), as well as some Star-of-David emblazoned party finery that I dutifully wore throughout. Lots of people came! It was great. The cops came, too, eventually, drawn by the sight of unconcealed containers. They threatened to give me a summons but let everyone off with a warning and a somewhat peevish comment about we should be grateful. (I was grateful!)
Tom and I came in third (!) at trivia last week. Go Team "Elven Bards!" We are climbing the fucking ladder, people.
Show-wise, I've only been to, uh... I guess just one, and it wasn't very good -- Spoon, in Rockefeller Park. Very medium energy, those guys. I did go out to Williamsburg a couple of weeks ago to McCarren Park Pool to watch Night Of The Hunter, which I'd been meaning to see for a while. Creepy movie, esp. Robert Mitchum, but I feel like parts of it, esp. the bible stuff, were lost on me. Missed the Siren Festival (it was the last one? Fuck), but I'm going to They Might Be Giants on Wednesday with Nina and Randy and Danica.
Various wisdom teeth are hurting. I read a very long fan fiction on the Internet, thinking it was a bootleg of Harry Potter; and then I read the first part of the actual Harry Potter on the Internet.
Oh yeah, Chore Wars. We're all doing it. Get on the bus.
Nina and I managed to get through Caligula -- yes, that Caligula -- which is long and disturbing but not particularly sexy (although I was inexplicably aroused by the scene where Malcolm MacDowell fondles the tits of this old lady) or good. I am making her watch (the extended versions of) The Lord of the Rings.
My friend Squick, who'd moved to Boston, came back to NYC a few weeks ago, in part to celebrate the birthday of P.T., the 40-year-old (well, 41 now?) Thai guy who runs Bite, the sandwich shop that's sort of across the street from where I work. P.T.'d invited me to come along, too, so I did -- and it was a blast. It was me and Squick and some other guys from work and about a dozen Thai dudes I didn't know at this restaurant on 50th St. called Pooket. P.T. and his friend Peter ordered a bunch of stuff off-menu, like some really good spicy Lahb and some (also spicy) mango salad. Around eleven, the wait staff closed the front door and put on the karaoke machine in the back. I did the Ghostbusters theme song and some Thai songs I didn't, believe it or not, actually know the words to.
And then it was my birthday, precious; Sophie and I did another joint fiesta, and, while I was apprehensive about how it'd go, especially considering that she and I haven't really seen much of each other over the past year, it came off swimmingly and nobody got food poisoning. Nina scored a tres-leches cake from this really good local bakery (they were out of the Dora The Exporer cake), as well as some Star-of-David emblazoned party finery that I dutifully wore throughout. Lots of people came! It was great. The cops came, too, eventually, drawn by the sight of unconcealed containers. They threatened to give me a summons but let everyone off with a warning and a somewhat peevish comment about we should be grateful. (I was grateful!)
Tom and I came in third (!) at trivia last week. Go Team "Elven Bards!" We are climbing the fucking ladder, people.
Show-wise, I've only been to, uh... I guess just one, and it wasn't very good -- Spoon, in Rockefeller Park. Very medium energy, those guys. I did go out to Williamsburg a couple of weeks ago to McCarren Park Pool to watch Night Of The Hunter, which I'd been meaning to see for a while. Creepy movie, esp. Robert Mitchum, but I feel like parts of it, esp. the bible stuff, were lost on me. Missed the Siren Festival (it was the last one? Fuck), but I'm going to They Might Be Giants on Wednesday with Nina and Randy and Danica.
Various wisdom teeth are hurting. I read a very long fan fiction on the Internet, thinking it was a bootleg of Harry Potter; and then I read the first part of the actual Harry Potter on the Internet.
Oh yeah, Chore Wars. We're all doing it. Get on the bus.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Violent Femmes, Diarrhea
After work on Thursday I went down to White St. for one of the Make Music NY festival shows. I don't know who else was on the roster, but my friend Squick had told me a while back that his friend Nullsleep was someone to check out, so. This particular show was sponsored by a place called The Tank, and they'd gotten a permit to clear out the whole block. On the way there I saw an enormous sweaty orange bodybuilder hassling a mousy, middle-aged woman, possibly his wife, outside of a Chinese pharmacy. He kept jabbing his finger into her purse, which she was holding up to her chest. "You're drunk!" he kept yelling. "Don't tell me you're not drunk!" The music was pretty good (in particular this guy Bit Shifter), but the show itself was merely okay. It was a bunch of dudes playing techno music that they'd tracked on their Game Boys -- not a terribly interactive experience, although they were playing it from the Game Boys to the big speakers that had been set up, and the tracking software apparently had some features that let you improv a little on the fly by hitting buttons on the Game Boy. The crowd, though, was fucking psyched. I haven't seen that many dancing nerds there in a while -- there were frizzy-haired nerds, big-glasses nerds, even a nerd with a stumpy little arm, as you can see in this picture (I'm just off-camera to the right, holding a pink plastic bag containing picture frames and condoms).
Friday I went with Tom and 'Leen and Eve to the Ralph Stanley show at the ol' Bandshell. The man himself was pretty brilliant, but he kept kind of tossing the mic over to members of his band to do one-off numbers from their solo albums, and none of them were really that good -- although all had won Grammys and things, as he kept telling us. It was really cold for some reason that night, too. Ironically, the Celebrate Brooklyn people were doling out, in return for the $3 admission, these little American Express-branded pocket fans, which were both unnecessary, and, as I discovered later on a truly hot day, totally useless.
Saturday Nina and I went over to Warsaw to see Violent Femmes. I hadn't really eaten anything all day, so before leaving her house I slurped down the remains of this turkey sandwich she'd bought like five days before at Sunset Bagels. It was covered in liquid lettuce and tasted sort of funny, but I was so hungry that I didn't care. I started to care pretty hard in the cab ride over, but I managed to not shit my pants until the end of the show, when we scurried out and I was able to void myself, wretchedly, at Matchless. I've never done that before! At a bar, that is. Anyway, the 'Femmes were pretty sweet, although their post-Blister In The Sun material is significantly less catchy. I hadn't been paying much attention to their ouvre since high school, I guess. They played their hits, though -- at the end -- with this kind of teasing, casual virtuosity that was pretty intimidating, musically.
After the show (and the shitting) we walked over to Greenpoint and had drinks at Pencil Factory -- two different kinds of fancy bourbon and then some Sweet Action, which the bartender comped us for some reason. We have sweet, hopeful faces, I suppose. Then we got locked in at The Mark Bar playing The Sopranos pinball, and the bouncer made a point of introducing us to the bartender. "I could tell these people were solid," the bouncer said. We are solid!
On the way ride home, though, around 3:00 or 4:00 AM, our car service car got a flat. It happened without us really realizing it, but all of a sudden we were just kind of crawling along down the BQE at four MPH. Our driver limped us over to the shoulder and we were heading for the closest exit when we noticed a yellow cab tailgating us pretty closely. "Oh," our driver said, "he must want to pick you guys up. Is that okay? Sorry about this." Sure, we said. No problem. Are you going to be okay? We got out of the car and made for the cab.
The cabbie leaned out of his window, though, and started yelling at us. "What are you doing?" he yelled. "You're gonna get killed!" I made a gesture like, what? "You're going to get killed!" he yelled. "Get back in the car!" So we got back in the car. Sorry, we told our guy, looks like he's not going to pick us up. So our car service guy got us off the Expressway and into Brooklyn Heights (the cab zipped off as inexplicably as it'd shown up) and we waited for him to change the tire while it became more and more Blue O'Clock in the sky.
Nina's friends (and former roommates) via Winnie, Randy and his girlfriend Danica, are moving into my new apartment as my roommates! Psyched about this. Like several of Nina's friends, Randy's a Parsons guy, and he makes things; he's come back to the East coast to do an artist-in-residency thing at Eyebeam for the next several months -- he mumbled something to me about enslaving a bunch of interns and having them implement and improve a web site in PHP, kind of creating the machinery of their own oppression. It's a valuable lesson about work. They are finalizing their move-in this evening. I wanted to have cookies ready for them (Eve sent me a powerful good recipe), but I've been pretty busy (and a bit too hot for cooking).
Winnie and Evan and Nina and I hit up Coney Island on Sunday. We lay around in the sun for a while and then did the bumper cars. And then there was talk of finding a scary ride to go on, and I felt like that day was a day on which I was prepared to go on a scary ride -- like, say, The Cyclone. But The Cyclone wasn't running, and so their gimlet eyes seized upon what was quite possibly the worst and scariest-looking ride in all of Astroland, the Top Spin 2. This picture does not do it justice. The thing is some kind of fear engine, and I knew I couldn't stomach it, so, humiliatingly, I bowed out. Nina, in spite of her obvious fear -- and my observation that none of the participants before us seemed to be very happy as they disembarked -- mastered herself and, along with Winnie and Evan, threw herself under the wheels of spinning and gravity. I was very impressed. The thing was sort of nauseating just to see in action. And everyone seemed to be pretty rattled afterwards, but I still feel a little... I don't know, like I should've been able to do it.
Trivia last night at Greenwich Treehouse, unfortunately sans Emma. Nina, Eve, and Tom were there, though, and we zeroed out in style under the name Dragon Magazine. Who knew that the hula hoop was more popular than Barbie?
Tonight... you. No, wait -- tonight, Joan Jett.
Friday I went with Tom and 'Leen and Eve to the Ralph Stanley show at the ol' Bandshell. The man himself was pretty brilliant, but he kept kind of tossing the mic over to members of his band to do one-off numbers from their solo albums, and none of them were really that good -- although all had won Grammys and things, as he kept telling us. It was really cold for some reason that night, too. Ironically, the Celebrate Brooklyn people were doling out, in return for the $3 admission, these little American Express-branded pocket fans, which were both unnecessary, and, as I discovered later on a truly hot day, totally useless.
Saturday Nina and I went over to Warsaw to see Violent Femmes. I hadn't really eaten anything all day, so before leaving her house I slurped down the remains of this turkey sandwich she'd bought like five days before at Sunset Bagels. It was covered in liquid lettuce and tasted sort of funny, but I was so hungry that I didn't care. I started to care pretty hard in the cab ride over, but I managed to not shit my pants until the end of the show, when we scurried out and I was able to void myself, wretchedly, at Matchless. I've never done that before! At a bar, that is. Anyway, the 'Femmes were pretty sweet, although their post-Blister In The Sun material is significantly less catchy. I hadn't been paying much attention to their ouvre since high school, I guess. They played their hits, though -- at the end -- with this kind of teasing, casual virtuosity that was pretty intimidating, musically.
After the show (and the shitting) we walked over to Greenpoint and had drinks at Pencil Factory -- two different kinds of fancy bourbon and then some Sweet Action, which the bartender comped us for some reason. We have sweet, hopeful faces, I suppose. Then we got locked in at The Mark Bar playing The Sopranos pinball, and the bouncer made a point of introducing us to the bartender. "I could tell these people were solid," the bouncer said. We are solid!
On the way ride home, though, around 3:00 or 4:00 AM, our car service car got a flat. It happened without us really realizing it, but all of a sudden we were just kind of crawling along down the BQE at four MPH. Our driver limped us over to the shoulder and we were heading for the closest exit when we noticed a yellow cab tailgating us pretty closely. "Oh," our driver said, "he must want to pick you guys up. Is that okay? Sorry about this." Sure, we said. No problem. Are you going to be okay? We got out of the car and made for the cab.
The cabbie leaned out of his window, though, and started yelling at us. "What are you doing?" he yelled. "You're gonna get killed!" I made a gesture like, what? "You're going to get killed!" he yelled. "Get back in the car!" So we got back in the car. Sorry, we told our guy, looks like he's not going to pick us up. So our car service guy got us off the Expressway and into Brooklyn Heights (the cab zipped off as inexplicably as it'd shown up) and we waited for him to change the tire while it became more and more Blue O'Clock in the sky.
Nina's friends (and former roommates) via Winnie, Randy and his girlfriend Danica, are moving into my new apartment as my roommates! Psyched about this. Like several of Nina's friends, Randy's a Parsons guy, and he makes things; he's come back to the East coast to do an artist-in-residency thing at Eyebeam for the next several months -- he mumbled something to me about enslaving a bunch of interns and having them implement and improve a web site in PHP, kind of creating the machinery of their own oppression. It's a valuable lesson about work. They are finalizing their move-in this evening. I wanted to have cookies ready for them (Eve sent me a powerful good recipe), but I've been pretty busy (and a bit too hot for cooking).
Winnie and Evan and Nina and I hit up Coney Island on Sunday. We lay around in the sun for a while and then did the bumper cars. And then there was talk of finding a scary ride to go on, and I felt like that day was a day on which I was prepared to go on a scary ride -- like, say, The Cyclone. But The Cyclone wasn't running, and so their gimlet eyes seized upon what was quite possibly the worst and scariest-looking ride in all of Astroland, the Top Spin 2. This picture does not do it justice. The thing is some kind of fear engine, and I knew I couldn't stomach it, so, humiliatingly, I bowed out. Nina, in spite of her obvious fear -- and my observation that none of the participants before us seemed to be very happy as they disembarked -- mastered herself and, along with Winnie and Evan, threw herself under the wheels of spinning and gravity. I was very impressed. The thing was sort of nauseating just to see in action. And everyone seemed to be pretty rattled afterwards, but I still feel a little... I don't know, like I should've been able to do it.
Trivia last night at Greenwich Treehouse, unfortunately sans Emma. Nina, Eve, and Tom were there, though, and we zeroed out in style under the name Dragon Magazine. Who knew that the hula hoop was more popular than Barbie?
Tonight... you. No, wait -- tonight, Joan Jett.
Monday, June 11, 2007
White Summer
The Direct From Hollywood Cemetery show at The Pyramid last Thursday was fantastic! I still don't get why nobody but me is into them. Sure, they're a little stagey, which, if you weren't inclined to like them for other reasons, might only deepen your contempt -- but their songs are incredibly catchy and their playing is incredibly tight, considering they only play about one show a year. I was a little worried they weren't gonna do the intro where the lead singer bursts out of a paper coffin (as the audience chants "Rise, Dr. Fanges!"), but, uh... they did it. They had a smoke machine this time, too. Also kind of central to the show being awesome were these two incredibly drunk girls who were the only people in the audience (well, besides me, naturally) who seemed to realize they were at a rock show. They were hooting and hollering and moshing around and wound up kind of slopping themselves around on the beer-covered floor a whole bunch. It was pretty Blue States Lose, except not in a bathroom and nobody puked. I'm a faithful man, but I will admit being a bit thrilled that they were shoving me and grabbing at my jacket.
On Saturday Katharine and Nina and I hopped the LIRR out to Belmont Park and spent the day betting on the ponies. It was the Belmont Stakes! I'd never actually been to a racetrack before, though I'd done some betting at Emma's OTB birthday party a few years ago. The track facility itself was a little less fancy than I'd expected -- it was kind of a cross between, you know, an OTB, and, say... an airport. The horses were very strong and cool looking, though -- I saw one that I wanted to bet on but couldn't properly identify that had unnervingly blue eyes and was drooling a lot. We got there around Race 5 and stayed until the big one, which was Race 11 or 12. Nina was the big winner in terms of picking the right horses -- she won three or four times with a variety of different bets. (Her get of choice is the boxed exacta, a convenient way of betting on the first and second horses in either order.) K-Rod came in second, and I didn't win anything until the Stakes itself -- I was down about $80 and made $65 of it back on the box with Curlin and Rags to Riches.
A guy near the stables told us that a lot of the earlier races have unreliable handicapping because the owners will dope a second- or third-tier horse in these races, ruining it for a long-term career and possibly incurring penalties themselves but come out ahead on the bet money, so it's sometimes better to bet on a 5-to-1 horse than, say, a 3-to-2. That's consistent with my typical maverick strategy, anyway, even though, you know, said strategy was basically a complete failure. Horse racing is a hard game.
On the way back we sat in front of this quintet of noisy frat boys calling each other faggots and giving each other dead arms. I wondered out loud to Nina whether they'd sing themselves to sleep. Eventually they did.
On Sunday Eve got a bicycle in Williamsburg and she and Nina and I stuffed ourselves practically to the point of, you know, eruption at this barbecue place on Metropolitan Avenue called Fette Sau.
Last night I decided to make the "Sin City" Breakfast Tacos that Robert Rodriguez describes here (somewhat off-puttingly insisting on the native pronunciation of "taco"). They came out pretty okay -- the super-easy filling was easier to make than the tortillas themselves and kind of tastier -- but my advice is to use lard, as he recommends (they didn't have it at the Key Food in Sunset Park!), and to use a little bit more flour than he does, because my tortillas came out pretty sticky and hard to work with. Oh, also it takes way more than 10 minutes. It takes like an hour and a half, and your smoke detector will go off, and you will try to pull it off the wall to take the battery out but then it turns out it's wired into the ceiling and you just broke the fixture and your smoke detector is now hanging by a bunch of stupid wires from the ceiling.
On Saturday Katharine and Nina and I hopped the LIRR out to Belmont Park and spent the day betting on the ponies. It was the Belmont Stakes! I'd never actually been to a racetrack before, though I'd done some betting at Emma's OTB birthday party a few years ago. The track facility itself was a little less fancy than I'd expected -- it was kind of a cross between, you know, an OTB, and, say... an airport. The horses were very strong and cool looking, though -- I saw one that I wanted to bet on but couldn't properly identify that had unnervingly blue eyes and was drooling a lot. We got there around Race 5 and stayed until the big one, which was Race 11 or 12. Nina was the big winner in terms of picking the right horses -- she won three or four times with a variety of different bets. (Her get of choice is the boxed exacta, a convenient way of betting on the first and second horses in either order.) K-Rod came in second, and I didn't win anything until the Stakes itself -- I was down about $80 and made $65 of it back on the box with Curlin and Rags to Riches.
A guy near the stables told us that a lot of the earlier races have unreliable handicapping because the owners will dope a second- or third-tier horse in these races, ruining it for a long-term career and possibly incurring penalties themselves but come out ahead on the bet money, so it's sometimes better to bet on a 5-to-1 horse than, say, a 3-to-2. That's consistent with my typical maverick strategy, anyway, even though, you know, said strategy was basically a complete failure. Horse racing is a hard game.
On the way back we sat in front of this quintet of noisy frat boys calling each other faggots and giving each other dead arms. I wondered out loud to Nina whether they'd sing themselves to sleep. Eventually they did.
On Sunday Eve got a bicycle in Williamsburg and she and Nina and I stuffed ourselves practically to the point of, you know, eruption at this barbecue place on Metropolitan Avenue called Fette Sau.
Last night I decided to make the "Sin City" Breakfast Tacos that Robert Rodriguez describes here (somewhat off-puttingly insisting on the native pronunciation of "taco"). They came out pretty okay -- the super-easy filling was easier to make than the tortillas themselves and kind of tastier -- but my advice is to use lard, as he recommends (they didn't have it at the Key Food in Sunset Park!), and to use a little bit more flour than he does, because my tortillas came out pretty sticky and hard to work with. Oh, also it takes way more than 10 minutes. It takes like an hour and a half, and your smoke detector will go off, and you will try to pull it off the wall to take the battery out but then it turns out it's wired into the ceiling and you just broke the fixture and your smoke detector is now hanging by a bunch of stupid wires from the ceiling.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Fuck Williamsburg
Tom and Emma and I went to trivia night at the Greenwich Treehouse on Monday night, and I'm pleased to say our fortunes improved over the last time she and I'd gone. The Comancheros (nee Brooklyn Excelsiors) finished squarely in the middle -- as opposed to dead last. I give myself props for knowing that Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for Gone With The Wind even though I've never seen it, and for identifying the UB40 song "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You;" I do not deserve props for forgetting to double the length of the hypotenuse in the one math problem of the evening.
It was around 10:00 when trivia night got out and I was tired and drunk, but I decided to head out to Williamsburg anyway to catch the Horrors show at the Luna Lounge. And... well, I'd typed up with a total indictment of the borough and its people, making the claim that I finally understand what everyone is talking about when they say they hate the place, but, you know, it came off a bit shrill. Suffice it to say that the show was not so great, not least of all because the Horrors are not very good live -- kind of a surprise because I'd liked the stuff of theirs that I'd listened to on the 'net. The lead singer has this total lack of charisma and stage presence; he's an obvious, nervous poseur with a lousy voice, and the brief bit of stage-diving he did was a pallid gesture towards proper rock star behavior. The rest of the band was an awkward, silly embarrassment. The audience didn't help, either -- very bridge-and-tunnel, and fucking everyone close to the stage was taking pictures with annoyingly professional-looking cameras. When I finally slouched my way back to Bedford Ave., it took literally 45 minutes for the L to come.
But I hadn't learned my lesson, because last night, I went back out there with Nina and her friends Thomas and Evan to see The Fucking Champs at Studio B. It was a much better show, especially in comparison, except, I guess, for the fact that the audience could not be persuaded to dance around. Oh, and that apparently those guy are an all-instrumental act? Don't know how I missed that. They sound great, though -- and, as Nina pointed out, they are almost certainly better than you at Guitar Hero.
Watching Hoop Dreams right now and eating a veggie burger. As everyone told me at the time it came out, it's pretty amazing. It's like that episode of Star Trek where Picard gets to experience the entire life of that dude on that alien planet in the span of a few minutes. I mean, it's not quite like that, but.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to hit up the Pyramid club for the first time since high school (for a Diplobrats show where I met Archie's dealer / modeling agent) to see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery -- for the first time since they opened for Ted Leo a year and some change ago. Look at their MySpace page, NYC people, and tell me you don't want to come see them with me.
It was around 10:00 when trivia night got out and I was tired and drunk, but I decided to head out to Williamsburg anyway to catch the Horrors show at the Luna Lounge. And... well, I'd typed up with a total indictment of the borough and its people, making the claim that I finally understand what everyone is talking about when they say they hate the place, but, you know, it came off a bit shrill. Suffice it to say that the show was not so great, not least of all because the Horrors are not very good live -- kind of a surprise because I'd liked the stuff of theirs that I'd listened to on the 'net. The lead singer has this total lack of charisma and stage presence; he's an obvious, nervous poseur with a lousy voice, and the brief bit of stage-diving he did was a pallid gesture towards proper rock star behavior. The rest of the band was an awkward, silly embarrassment. The audience didn't help, either -- very bridge-and-tunnel, and fucking everyone close to the stage was taking pictures with annoyingly professional-looking cameras. When I finally slouched my way back to Bedford Ave., it took literally 45 minutes for the L to come.
But I hadn't learned my lesson, because last night, I went back out there with Nina and her friends Thomas and Evan to see The Fucking Champs at Studio B. It was a much better show, especially in comparison, except, I guess, for the fact that the audience could not be persuaded to dance around. Oh, and that apparently those guy are an all-instrumental act? Don't know how I missed that. They sound great, though -- and, as Nina pointed out, they are almost certainly better than you at Guitar Hero.
Watching Hoop Dreams right now and eating a veggie burger. As everyone told me at the time it came out, it's pretty amazing. It's like that episode of Star Trek where Picard gets to experience the entire life of that dude on that alien planet in the span of a few minutes. I mean, it's not quite like that, but.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to hit up the Pyramid club for the first time since high school (for a Diplobrats show where I met Archie's dealer / modeling agent) to see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery -- for the first time since they opened for Ted Leo a year and some change ago. Look at their MySpace page, NYC people, and tell me you don't want to come see them with me.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Bentley Bear
I've basically finished painting my new apartment. That I painted at all may come as a surprise to those of you who have locked horns with me over my admittedly perverse inclination towards plain white walls, but I figured that, you know, this is the first apartment I've moved into entirely on my own and I'm going to make some bold choices. So the Saturday before last I went down to Home Depot with Eve and Nina, and we got paint. I picked a yellowy-green color called Pear for the living room, [in retrospect what seems to be a pretty garish] bright orange called fuckin' Bird Of Paradise for the kitchen and bathroom, and a soft blue color called Little Pond for my bedroom. The next morning my parents came down to see the new place and they helped tape and paint the living room, as did Eve and Nina. It came out great! Pear: Highly recommended for all the dark, cave-like rooms in your house.
The living room's pretty big, so it took about three hours for us to paint the whole thing, and when we were done I took my parents out to Matamoros for tacos. It was one of my more humiliating Matamoros experiences: Since everyone was having tacos, I tried to collate the entire order and tried to read it in English to our waitress -- who I believed spoke English for some reason I can't remember now -- but she didn't understand and went to go get the new guy who speaks English fluently (and manages the place, I think), to whom I read our list half in Spanish and half in English, because he was obviously kind of disgusted by my pronunciation. Eve, sitting directly across from me during this fiasco, flushed visibly. But it ended up okay, because the tacos were off the fucking chain as usual and Nina got a guanabana milkshake that was kind of a revelation.
The rest of the painting I did pretty much solo, and it kind of sucked -- I was sore and praying for it to be, you know, over, the entire time, but I got the kitchen painted and then, by last Friday, my bedroom, though I made a lot of mistakes and there are some fairly visible unpainted spots. And, you know, now it's over.
What else did I do that weekend? Nina and Eve and I attempted to attend this Lightning Bolt show in a weird little room above a garage in Bushwick but were turned away because it was "sold out" -- even though the venue was mostly empty from what we could see. According to some of Eve's friends who were able to gain entry, we didn't miss much, other than the lead singer puking on some of the audience. Instead, we wandered and trained over to Barcade and played games for a while. I discovered that the original Galaga (which they have as part of this three-way Galaga emulator) is way more brutal than the one at Clean Rite and that I don't really like it -- or most old arcade games, for that matter. They're too hard! Eve introduced Nina to this (what I think is an) unplayably frustrating game called Crystal Castles.
Last Thursday I stopped by 471 12th in order to, as bidden, clean the bathroom and the stove and the fridge and sweep the floors and ugh argh bleagh. I guess John didn't think I was gonna do it, though, because he'd changed the locks on the apartment door. Luckily, sort of, the new tenants were moving a few things in at the very moment I showed up and were gracious enough to let me in. All the excess junk had been cleared out and the floors with freshly and beautifully polyurethaned. The stove was still filthy, but the new people told me I was off the hook, since he was going to get a maid service to come in and do it. Two downsides, though -- the screws on my old air conditioner were too stripped for me to remove it from the window, and, more importantly, my Galaga tile mosaic that I'd stashed in the kitchen cupboard for safe-keeping was missing. I'd wanted to cement it to one of the chimney columns on the roof (bought cement and grout and everything), but John'd installed a fire alarm thing on the door to the roof the week before I tried to put it up. I hope, at least, one of the painters took a liking to it and kept it.
On Saturday Nina and I did the First Saturday thing at the Brooklyn Museum. I hadn't been for a while, but, as part of my do-everything-possible-this-summer agenda (accompanied by my overstuffed and overambitious Google calendar: HTML and Google Calendar format) I thought I should start doin' it again. First, though, we got some shit at Target and wound up meeting, improbably and awkwardly meeting with the new 12th St. tenants, who did not want to recognize me for some reason. (Maybe they found the dogporn archive?! That's enough to put anyone off their lunch.) I got some t-shirts and then we met up with Eve and some of her friends from work to watch a POV documentary about factory workers in Tijuana, and then spent some time hanging out in the ballroom watching people square dance. I found a large and ornate earring on the ground that must've fallen out of someone's ear -- it was a metal hoop with a bunch of fine threads kind of threaded in and out of the center. I held it up in the air for a little while in the hopes that its owner would recognize it, but she didn't.
Yesterday Ted and Tom and Nina and I drove out to the Red Hook ball fields for some Mexican food. I'd first noticed the food stands a few years ago while driving with Lester but wasn't really keyed in to what an institution they are until recently. The lines are pretty long but we optimized by getting buttery-cheesey-spicy corn, limeade, and raw coconut (which is inedible, as far as I'm concerned -- it's like eating wood! Everyone else was homphed it with gusto, but I had to spit mine out) while we waited for the main event, these delicious and enormous overstuffed taco-like food items called quesohuaraches -- bean paste-stuffed fried tortillas filled with cheese and carne enchilada and other things. Then Nina and I watched this problematic all-day TLC special on this morbid obesity-treatment facility in the city. It was like 12 hours of naughty fat people sneaking food into their rooms and being hoisted around on cranes.
Tonight: Trivia Night with Emma et al. at the Greenwich Treehouse. The first time she and I went, we were full of smug anticipation of victory but ended up losing. With zero points. Better luck this time? Also, The Horrors are playing.
The living room's pretty big, so it took about three hours for us to paint the whole thing, and when we were done I took my parents out to Matamoros for tacos. It was one of my more humiliating Matamoros experiences: Since everyone was having tacos, I tried to collate the entire order and tried to read it in English to our waitress -- who I believed spoke English for some reason I can't remember now -- but she didn't understand and went to go get the new guy who speaks English fluently (and manages the place, I think), to whom I read our list half in Spanish and half in English, because he was obviously kind of disgusted by my pronunciation. Eve, sitting directly across from me during this fiasco, flushed visibly. But it ended up okay, because the tacos were off the fucking chain as usual and Nina got a guanabana milkshake that was kind of a revelation.
The rest of the painting I did pretty much solo, and it kind of sucked -- I was sore and praying for it to be, you know, over, the entire time, but I got the kitchen painted and then, by last Friday, my bedroom, though I made a lot of mistakes and there are some fairly visible unpainted spots. And, you know, now it's over.
What else did I do that weekend? Nina and Eve and I attempted to attend this Lightning Bolt show in a weird little room above a garage in Bushwick but were turned away because it was "sold out" -- even though the venue was mostly empty from what we could see. According to some of Eve's friends who were able to gain entry, we didn't miss much, other than the lead singer puking on some of the audience. Instead, we wandered and trained over to Barcade and played games for a while. I discovered that the original Galaga (which they have as part of this three-way Galaga emulator) is way more brutal than the one at Clean Rite and that I don't really like it -- or most old arcade games, for that matter. They're too hard! Eve introduced Nina to this (what I think is an) unplayably frustrating game called Crystal Castles.
Last Thursday I stopped by 471 12th in order to, as bidden, clean the bathroom and the stove and the fridge and sweep the floors and ugh argh bleagh. I guess John didn't think I was gonna do it, though, because he'd changed the locks on the apartment door. Luckily, sort of, the new tenants were moving a few things in at the very moment I showed up and were gracious enough to let me in. All the excess junk had been cleared out and the floors with freshly and beautifully polyurethaned. The stove was still filthy, but the new people told me I was off the hook, since he was going to get a maid service to come in and do it. Two downsides, though -- the screws on my old air conditioner were too stripped for me to remove it from the window, and, more importantly, my Galaga tile mosaic that I'd stashed in the kitchen cupboard for safe-keeping was missing. I'd wanted to cement it to one of the chimney columns on the roof (bought cement and grout and everything), but John'd installed a fire alarm thing on the door to the roof the week before I tried to put it up. I hope, at least, one of the painters took a liking to it and kept it.
On Saturday Nina and I did the First Saturday thing at the Brooklyn Museum. I hadn't been for a while, but, as part of my do-everything-possible-this-summer agenda (accompanied by my overstuffed and overambitious Google calendar: HTML and Google Calendar format) I thought I should start doin' it again. First, though, we got some shit at Target and wound up meeting, improbably and awkwardly meeting with the new 12th St. tenants, who did not want to recognize me for some reason. (Maybe they found the dogporn archive?! That's enough to put anyone off their lunch.) I got some t-shirts and then we met up with Eve and some of her friends from work to watch a POV documentary about factory workers in Tijuana, and then spent some time hanging out in the ballroom watching people square dance. I found a large and ornate earring on the ground that must've fallen out of someone's ear -- it was a metal hoop with a bunch of fine threads kind of threaded in and out of the center. I held it up in the air for a little while in the hopes that its owner would recognize it, but she didn't.
Yesterday Ted and Tom and Nina and I drove out to the Red Hook ball fields for some Mexican food. I'd first noticed the food stands a few years ago while driving with Lester but wasn't really keyed in to what an institution they are until recently. The lines are pretty long but we optimized by getting buttery-cheesey-spicy corn, limeade, and raw coconut (which is inedible, as far as I'm concerned -- it's like eating wood! Everyone else was homphed it with gusto, but I had to spit mine out) while we waited for the main event, these delicious and enormous overstuffed taco-like food items called quesohuaraches -- bean paste-stuffed fried tortillas filled with cheese and carne enchilada and other things. Then Nina and I watched this problematic all-day TLC special on this morbid obesity-treatment facility in the city. It was like 12 hours of naughty fat people sneaking food into their rooms and being hoisted around on cranes.
Tonight: Trivia Night with Emma et al. at the Greenwich Treehouse. The first time she and I went, we were full of smug anticipation of victory but ended up losing. With zero points. Better luck this time? Also, The Horrors are playing.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Harvard Law School
Well, I moved into my new apartment. Eve and Nina came over the two nights before the move and helped me pack everything up. Naturally, it was an odd experience to box up the past three-odd years of my life, but refreshing, too -- I got to jettison about five garbage bags worth of detritus that I and others had accumulated in that creaky old puke-stained place. The move itself was pretty much a snap, even counting all the heavy shit that had to get moved, not least of all this enormous new sofabed I've inherited from my mom's parents. Yeah, I hired movers. But I did it through this kind of mover auction site where you can get competitive bids, and ended up getting some guys who only wanted $275 and who were totally amazing and efficient. (They go by the name "C & C Movers," but Googling that turns up about a dozen different people, so get their info on the CitiMove site, I guess, if you're interested.) We got the whole thing done in about four hours. Nina helped; she has got phenomenal stamina, emotional and otherwise.
The day I really started packing everything up, I took Kitty to Animal Kind for possibly the last time to get some dental work done. She's developed a drooling problem that's gotten worse and worse over the past few years, and Nina'd finally convinced me that I had a moral responsibility to get it fixed. So I brought her in for a physical and they figured out that she had a really rotten tooth in the back on the right. I resisted on skeptical grounds for a little while, but finally caved and dropped her off. In typical Animal Kind fashion, when I picked her up they told me they'd not only extracted the one we'd arranged, but also performed six other "minor extractions." Yes, Kitty still has teeth, but I'm out a half a G, basically. After I picked her up, though, she was really happy and frisky, and I don't think it's just from the drugs they gave her (although she spent the next couple of days bumping into things) -- the drool is gone! Or, at least, she only drools and predictable times now.
I also got rid of my old tower machine; gave it to Tom's gee-eff, Colleen. While I was clearing all the porn and spyware off of it, I came across a bunch of old ASCII art packages and even the original source and layout material for the zine I did in high school with Razor, Halflife. I'll see if I can post some of it in the next week or two -- it'd a bit cliche to say that it's, you know, angsty and adolescent, but I will say that some of it's pretty grim, in terms how hard it sounds like I'm trying to keep the despair out of it.
So, the new place doesn't get that much direct sunlight, let's say, but there are several windows onto this actually very scenic alley between the buildings that's full of beautiful old brickwork -- and a Heathcliff-like arcade of trash cans that a trio of neighborhood cats have exciting and noisy fights over. Kitty is by turns enthralled and terrified. Also, the kitchen, living room, and bathroom windows are all within a few feet of each other outside, so you can throw things from the living room into the kitchen without getting up. I picked up paint today at Home Depot and mom and Eve and Nina are coming over tomorrow to help get things painted; I'll have pictures after that's done.
The bathroom is kind of tiny. So far that's my biggest peeve about the place.
Last weekend, for the second half of our High Line Festival extravaganza, Tom and Eve and Nina and I went to go see Ricky Gervais at the Madison Square Garden theater. Predictably, he was pretty great, although a lot of the material was stuff he'd done before (and is awfully... I don't know, broad, or something. A lot of jokes about animals and fables and what-were-they-thinking observations on figures from world history). David Bowie (I think -- we were sitting in the back row) opened the show with a somewhat timid rendition of the Chubby Little Loser song from the second season of Extras. There were a surprising number of hecklers for the venue and the act, with whom he dealt efficiently.
I have other Things I've Done to talk about, but I'm going to post this now, because it's been too long.
The day I really started packing everything up, I took Kitty to Animal Kind for possibly the last time to get some dental work done. She's developed a drooling problem that's gotten worse and worse over the past few years, and Nina'd finally convinced me that I had a moral responsibility to get it fixed. So I brought her in for a physical and they figured out that she had a really rotten tooth in the back on the right. I resisted on skeptical grounds for a little while, but finally caved and dropped her off. In typical Animal Kind fashion, when I picked her up they told me they'd not only extracted the one we'd arranged, but also performed six other "minor extractions." Yes, Kitty still has teeth, but I'm out a half a G, basically. After I picked her up, though, she was really happy and frisky, and I don't think it's just from the drugs they gave her (although she spent the next couple of days bumping into things) -- the drool is gone! Or, at least, she only drools and predictable times now.
I also got rid of my old tower machine; gave it to Tom's gee-eff, Colleen. While I was clearing all the porn and spyware off of it, I came across a bunch of old ASCII art packages and even the original source and layout material for the zine I did in high school with Razor, Halflife. I'll see if I can post some of it in the next week or two -- it'd a bit cliche to say that it's, you know, angsty and adolescent, but I will say that some of it's pretty grim, in terms how hard it sounds like I'm trying to keep the despair out of it.
So, the new place doesn't get that much direct sunlight, let's say, but there are several windows onto this actually very scenic alley between the buildings that's full of beautiful old brickwork -- and a Heathcliff-like arcade of trash cans that a trio of neighborhood cats have exciting and noisy fights over. Kitty is by turns enthralled and terrified. Also, the kitchen, living room, and bathroom windows are all within a few feet of each other outside, so you can throw things from the living room into the kitchen without getting up. I picked up paint today at Home Depot and mom and Eve and Nina are coming over tomorrow to help get things painted; I'll have pictures after that's done.
The bathroom is kind of tiny. So far that's my biggest peeve about the place.
Last weekend, for the second half of our High Line Festival extravaganza, Tom and Eve and Nina and I went to go see Ricky Gervais at the Madison Square Garden theater. Predictably, he was pretty great, although a lot of the material was stuff he'd done before (and is awfully... I don't know, broad, or something. A lot of jokes about animals and fables and what-were-they-thinking observations on figures from world history). David Bowie (I think -- we were sitting in the back row) opened the show with a somewhat timid rendition of the Chubby Little Loser song from the second season of Extras. There were a surprising number of hecklers for the venue and the act, with whom he dealt efficiently.
I have other Things I've Done to talk about, but I'm going to post this now, because it's been too long.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
This Idea Is Dildos
As prophesied, Ted and Katharine and Eve and I hit up the Arcade Fire show at Radio City on Wednesday. It was great, although we were in the very last row of the mezzanine -- for the best, perhaps, considering what happened down below. I'd bought the tickets in part because I kind of liked the band, but, honestly, more because the High Line Festival was being promoted and discussed as being a New York cultural... happening, and I wanted to be a part of it. And, you know, in my more self-confident moments I'm willing to grant that that's basically bullshit, but I'm glad that I got 'em because I'm getting pretty attached to the music. I feel like a lot of other too-many-people-on-stage bands are too much concerned with making some kind of glorious orchestral cacophony, and, you know, that's novel, I guess, but it doesn't rock. I'm gonna go ahead and say that Arcade Fire is first and foremost a rock and roll band: Their songs've got all the right tense and angry chord resolutions and nice hard beats. It's not happy music. So if they happen to want to dress like characters from Ada (e.g., cute girls in leotards stomping around the stage fiddling with theremins or some shit) and have a couple of dudes fight over bashing an un-mic'd symbol on stage during a song... that's okay with me.
But it would've been cooler if Bowie'd showed up.
I picked up Eve on the way up and got to see her office, which is very cool and professional-looking and in a beautiful old building -- the Prince George -- over on 28th St. Apparently a drug deal went down in the elevator as we were leaving? I failed to pick up on it. Eve, ever-vigilant.
Last night was Ted's birthday, so we all went out to the Olive Vine for dinner. It was the one on 7th Ave. and Lincoln, not the one up by me, but the menu is largely the same. I ordered the Olive Vine Pizza because it is fucking good, babies, and the Lincoln St. location prepares it better than mine, even: Lots of zucchini and some cilantro, even -- which Tom H., with whom we met up at PJ Hanley's afterwards, had never heard of but found delicious. He's from somewhere outside of London, though, so.
Woke up flatulent and slightly hung over this morning and headed over to Southpaw for this punk record swap thing I'd heard they were doing. It ended up being okay, but, true to their word, it was mostly records -- which I, you know, respect, but can't listen to -- and they didn't have any of the obscure stuff I was hoping they would, in particular the two albums ("Mentalenema" and "Nail It Down;" think they're John Peel-recorded) from this great 80s punk band The Abs. They've got a song on this compilation I bought in high school that really stands out and I've been searching unsuccessfully ever since for their shit on CD. The best I've been able to do is determine that some of the original members have re-formed under the aegis of Doctor Bison, but it looks like they don't tour or put out actual albums.
One of the former sysadmins from work just called me up out of the blue to come to his house for a belated Cinco de Mayo party. "We're making tamales and drinking tequila-based drinks," he said. Fuck, that sounds pretty good to me. Is this the start of the summer barbecue season?
But it would've been cooler if Bowie'd showed up.
I picked up Eve on the way up and got to see her office, which is very cool and professional-looking and in a beautiful old building -- the Prince George -- over on 28th St. Apparently a drug deal went down in the elevator as we were leaving? I failed to pick up on it. Eve, ever-vigilant.
Last night was Ted's birthday, so we all went out to the Olive Vine for dinner. It was the one on 7th Ave. and Lincoln, not the one up by me, but the menu is largely the same. I ordered the Olive Vine Pizza because it is fucking good, babies, and the Lincoln St. location prepares it better than mine, even: Lots of zucchini and some cilantro, even -- which Tom H., with whom we met up at PJ Hanley's afterwards, had never heard of but found delicious. He's from somewhere outside of London, though, so.
Woke up flatulent and slightly hung over this morning and headed over to Southpaw for this punk record swap thing I'd heard they were doing. It ended up being okay, but, true to their word, it was mostly records -- which I, you know, respect, but can't listen to -- and they didn't have any of the obscure stuff I was hoping they would, in particular the two albums ("Mentalenema" and "Nail It Down;" think they're John Peel-recorded) from this great 80s punk band The Abs. They've got a song on this compilation I bought in high school that really stands out and I've been searching unsuccessfully ever since for their shit on CD. The best I've been able to do is determine that some of the original members have re-formed under the aegis of Doctor Bison, but it looks like they don't tour or put out actual albums.
One of the former sysadmins from work just called me up out of the blue to come to his house for a belated Cinco de Mayo party. "We're making tamales and drinking tequila-based drinks," he said. Fuck, that sounds pretty good to me. Is this the start of the summer barbecue season?
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